NetFlow Analyzer: Determine the Performance of your Network through Cisco IP SLA

Growing business needs and to avoid time taken for arranging business meet, many companies and organization deploy facilities like Video Conferencing. Apart from this there are also other application like IPTV(Television over internet protocol) which could put load on the network.

Video packets (RTP) significantly impact network performance owing to their heavy nature and high flow rates. So before deploying video traffic on the network, the network should be assessed for performance as to how much will it impact the network?

Administrator responsibility is to check the health and performance of network before implementation. It has to be ensured that network is really capable enough to handle this kind of video traffic.

Cisco IP SLA :

Cisco IP SLA is a feature included in the Cisco IOS Software that gives administrators the ability to analyze service levels for IP applications and services. IP SLA uses active traffic-monitoring technology to monitor continuous traffic on the network. This is a reliable method in measuring overhead network performance. Cisco Routers provide IP SLA Responders that give accuracy of measured data across a network.

Cisco IPSLA helps to achieve following on the network:

Application and Network performance analysis on the network.
Reduce time and costs spend troubleshooting network performance issue.
Continuous monitoring of network health
Assessing Network capability before deploying network application or technology.

Cisco IPSLA VoIP and WAN RTT helps to analyze performance VoIP and data links on a network. Now the Cisco IPSLA VO helps you to identify performance of network when it has video traffic.

Cisco IP SLA VO:

IP SLA Video Operation (VO) is a new type of IP SLA technology that generates video traffic with the same traffic characteristics as a real video and measures the performance of link carrying this kind of video traffic.

IP SLA VO is similar to other IP SLA technology. It has a sender (source) to generate synthetic traffic, and a responder (destination) to absorb and analyze these packets.

IP SLA VO has following advantages:

We can analyze the network health before deploying Video Application
Troubleshooting performance of application end to end and per hop.
Understanding Video traffic pattern on the network and helps to capacity planning.

Cisco IP SLA VO operations provides various application profiles that enables administrator to check capability of the network before implementing them. The available profiles are Cisco Telepresence, IPTV, Webex and IPVSC etc.

Cisco IP SLA – Video Operations(IP SLA VO) acts as a stress tester on the network. One can validate the effect of rich media applications on the performance of other applications on the network. This helps a great way in ensuring that the network can handle video traffic smoothly and effectively.

Cisco IP SLA reports look like the one below: