Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series - Using Cisco IOS IP Slas to Measure Network Performance

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Software Configuration Guide—Release IOS XE 3.6.0E and IOS 15.2(2)E
OL_28731-01
Chapter 69 Configuring Cisco IOS IP SLA Operations
Understanding Cisco IOS IP SLAs
This section includes this information about IP SLAs functionality:
• Using Cisco IOS IP SLAs to Measure Network Performance, page 69-3
• IP SLAs Responder and IP SLAs Control Protocol, page 69-4
• Response Time Computation for IP SLAs, page 69-4
• IP SLAs Operation Scheduling, page 69-5
• IP SLAs Operation Threshold Monitoring, page 69-5
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 69-1 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
on the type of IP SLAs operation, it responds with time-stamp information for the source to make the
calculation on performance metrics. An IP SLAs operation performs a network measurement from the
source device to a destination in the network using a specific protocol such as UDP.
Figure 69-1 Cisco IOS IP SLAs Operation
To implement IP SLAs network performance measurement, you need to perform these tasks:
1. Enable the IP SLAs responder, if required.
2. Configure the required IP SLAs operation type.
3. Configure any options available for the specified operation type.
4. Configure threshold conditions, if required.
5. Schedule the operation to run, then let the operation run for a period of time to gather statistics.
6. Display and interpret the results of the operation using the Cisco IOS CLI or a network
management system (NMS) system with SNMP.