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Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3130 for Dell Software Configuration Guide
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Chapter41 Configuring Cisco IOS IP SLAs Operations
Understanding Cisco IOS IP SLAs
options such as source and destination IP address, User Datagram Protocol (UDP)/TCP por t numbers, a
type of service (ToS) byte (including Differentiated Services Code Point [DSCP] and IP Prefix bits),
Virtual Private Network (VPN) routing/forwarding instance (VRF), and URL web address.
Because Cisco IP SLAs is Layer 2 transport independent, you can configure end-to-end opera tions 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
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Measures the jitter, latency, or packet loss in the network.
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Provides continuous, reliable, and predictable measurements.
•IP service network health assessment to verify that the existing QoS is sufficie nt 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 measure m en t tha t
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 41-3
•IP SLAs Responder and IP SLAs Control Protocol, page 41-4
•Response Time Computation for IP SLAs, page 41-4
•IP SLAs Operation Scheduling, page 41-5
•IP SLAs Operation Threshold Monitoring, page41-5