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Information About Implementing IP Service Level Agreements
About IP Service Level Agreements Technology
IP SLA uses active traffic monitoring, which generates traffic in a continuous, reliable, and predictable manner
to measure network performance. IP SLA sends data across the network to measure performance between
multiple network locations or across multiple network paths. It simulates network data and IP services, and
collects network performance information in real time. This information is collected:
•
Response times
•
One-way latency, jitter (interpacket delay variance)
•
Packet loss
•
Network resource availability
IP SLA originated from the technology previously known as Service Assurance Agent (SAA). IP SLA performs
active monitoring by generating and analyzing traffic to measure performance, either between the router or
from a router to a remote IP device such as a network application server. Measurement statistics, which are
provided by the various IP SLA operations, are used for troubleshooting, problem analysis, and designing
network topologies.
Depending on the specific IP SLA operation, statistics of delay, packet loss, jitter, packet sequence, connectivity,
and path are monitored by and stored in the router and provided through command-line interface (CLI),
Extensive Markup Language (XML), and SNMP MIBs. IP SLA uses the Cisco RTTMON MIB to interact
between external Network Management System (NMS) applications and the IP SLA operations that are
running on Cisco devices. For a complete description of the object variables that are referenced by IP SLA,
see the text of the CISCO-RTTMON-MIB.my file that is available from the Cisco MIB Locator.
Service Level Agreements
Internet commerce has grown significantly in the past few years as the technology has advanced to provide
faster, more reliable access to the Internet. Many companies need online access and conduct most of their
business on line and any loss of service can affect the profitability of the company. Internet service providers
(ISPs) and even internal IT departments now offer a defined level of service
—
a service level agreement
—
to
provide their customers with a degree of predictability.
Network administrators are required to support service level agreements that support application solutions.
Figure 3: Scope of Traditional Service Level Agreement Versus IP SLA, on page 199
shows how IP SLA has
Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Router System Monitoring Configuration Guide, Release 4.2.x
198
Implementing IP Service Level Agreements
Information About Implementing IP Service Level Agreements