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Picking the right IP SLA settings

davehartburn
Level 1
Level 1

Can anyone advise on the best IP SLA settings to use, to monitor general link performance?

I have a number of Cisco 3560s linked with 2Gb port channels and want to produce some graphs showing if there are times when perfomance drops due to high traffic, or other causes.

After reading the docs, looking at jitter appeared to be the best guide, so I set up the following:

ip sla 1
udp-jitter X.X.X.X 5001 source-ip X.X.X.X source-port 5001 num-packets 3000
request-data-size 256
frequency 66
ip sla schedule 1 life forever start-time now

These have been running for many months. Using cacti to graph the output produces the least interesting graphs I have ever seen. I have slightly fuzzy horizontal lines. Either my network is perfect and gets great performance all the time, or I am not measuring anything useful.

All the examples I have found are for specific applications, such as VoIP. I have yet to find a guide for general data performance.

2 Replies 2

Ganesh Hariharan
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Can anyone advise on the best IP SLA settings to use, to monitor general link performance?

I have a number of Cisco 3560s linked with 2Gb port channels and want to produce some graphs showing if there are times when perfomance drops due to high traffic, or other causes.

After reading the docs, looking at jitter appeared to be the best guide, so I set up the following:

ip sla 1
udp-jitter X.X.X.X 5001 source-ip X.X.X.X source-port 5001 num-packets 3000
request-data-size 256
frequency 66
ip sla schedule 1 life forever start-time now

These have been running for many months. Using cacti to graph the output produces the least interesting graphs I have ever seen. I have slightly fuzzy horizontal lines. Either my network is perfect and gets great performance all the time, or I am not measuring anything useful.

All the examples I have found are for specific applications, such as VoIP. I have yet to find a guide for general data performance.

Hi,

Monitoring Jitter is aslo a good SLA as jitter gives you the exact delay variance like when multiple packets are sent consecutively from source to destination with 20 ms apart, and if the network is behaving ideally, the destination should be receiving them 20 ms apart. But if there are delays in the network (like queuing, arriving through alternate routes, and so on) the arrival delay between packets might be greater than or less than 20 ms.

There are currently fifteen unique Cisco IOS IP SLAs operations, each of which monitor different metrics, target different services, and possess unique characteristics. The appropriate Cisco IOS IP SLAs operation depends on the required application.Check out the below link hope that help.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/technologies/tk648/tk362/tk920/technologies_white_paper0900aecd8017f8c9.html

If helpful do rate the post

Ganesh.H

Thanks for the link. I found that give a good over view of the technology, but was not helpful at picking the right parameters, which is where I think I'm (possibly) failing.

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