Which components are included in EIGRP's metric?

• A. Bandwidth, delay, load, and reliability
• B. Hop count only
• C. Delay and bandwidth
• D. Cost based on bandwidth only

Answer: (A)

EIGRP uses a composite metric that combines several link characteristics, not just a single value like hop count or bandwidth alone. The metric takes into account bandwidth, delay, reliability, and load to reflect both the capacity and the quality of the path. Bandwidth considers the path’s available capacity (effectively the inverse of the minimum bandwidth along the route), while delay sums the delays across all links in the path. Reliability represents how dependable a link is, and load reflects current traffic on the link. These components are brought together using weighting factors (the K-values) to form the final metric. By default, bandwidth and delay are the primary influences, but load and reliability can be included when their respective K-values are nonzero. MTU is not part of the metric. Because of this, the metric truly encompasses multiple aspects of path quality, not just a single parameter.