Dell POWEREDGE M1000E User Manual

Page 1046

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41-2

Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3130 and 3032 for Dell Software Configuration Guide

OL-13270-03

Chapter 41 Configuring Cisco IOS IP SLAs Operations

Understanding Cisco IOS IP SLAs

Because Cisco IP SLAs is Layer 2 transport independent, you can configure end-to-end operations over
disparate networks to best reflect the metrics that an end user is likely to experience. IP SLAs collects a
unique subset of these performance metrics:

Delay (both round-trip and one-way)

Jitter (directional)

Packet loss (directional)

Packet sequencing (packet ordering)

Path (per hop)

Connectivity (directional)

Server or website download time

Because Cisco IOS IP SLAs is SNMP-accessible, it can also be used by performance-monitoring
applications like CiscoWorks Internetwork Performance Monitor (IPM) and other third-party Cisco
partner performance management products. You can find more details about network management
products that use Cisco IOS IP SLAs at this URL:

http://www.cisco.com/go/ipsla

Using IP SLAs can provide these benefits:

Service-level agreement monitoring, measurement, and verification.

Network performance monitoring

Measures the jitter, latency, or packet loss in the network.

Provides continuous, reliable, and predictable measurements.

IP service network health assessment to verify that the existing QoS is sufficient for new IP services.

Edge-to-edge network availability monitoring for proactive verification and connectivity testing of
network resources (for example, shows the network availability of an NFS server used to store
business critical data from a remote site).

Troubleshooting of network operation by providing consistent, reliable measurement that
immediately identifies problems and saves troubleshooting time.

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) performance monitoring and network verification (if the
switch supports MPLS)

This section includes this information about IP SLAs functionality:

Using Cisco IOS IP SLAs to Measure Network Performance, page 41-2

IP SLAs Responder and IP SLAs Control Protocol, page 41-3

Response Time Computation for IP SLAs, page 41-4

IP SLAs Operation Scheduling, page 41-5

IP SLAs Operation Threshold Monitoring, page 41-5

Using Cisco IOS IP SLAs to Measure Network Performance

You can use IP SLAs to monitor the performance between any area in the network—core, distribution,
and edge—without deploying a physical probe. It uses generated traffic to measure network performance
between two networking devices.

Figure 41-1

shows how IP SLAs begins when the source device sends

a generated packet to the destination device. After the destination device receives the packet, depending

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