cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
6121
Views
15
Helpful
6
Replies

Confused on IP SLA

harry
Level 1
Level 1

Hi all,

 

I have a router configured a fail-over between  the primary Link which is VDSL (Interface Eth0) and the backup link 4G (Interface Cellular0). I use IP SLA to track the primary as below. I know that the default timeout value of ip sla is 5000 ms which means when the router send out a icmp-echo, it will wait for a response up to 5 seconds before declaring the primary link down (Correct me if I'm wrong at this point). 

I did a ping test to 110.145.65.1 (My Internet Gateway) from the router itself and recognized that the maximum round trip time of a ping probe was never longer than 2 seconds. However, IP SLA kept flapping between the 2 links which resulted in an unstable internet connection for LAN users. It seems for me the timeout value doesn't work properly. so what is the reason for that? 

What are the correct values of Timeout, Frequency or Delay down that I should set in IP SLA to only trigger a fail-over if a ping probe fails for 10 seconds?

 

ip sla 1

icmp-echo 110.145.65.1 source-interface Ethernet 0

frequency 5

 

ip sla schedule 1 life forever start-time now

 

track 10 ip sla 1 reachability

 

ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Ethernet0 110.145.65.1 track 10

ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Cellular0 5

 

Thanks,

 

2 Accepted Solutions

Accepted Solutions

Hi these are the typical settings I use and don't get any problems

 

ip sla 1
icmp-echo 110.145.65.1 source-interface Ethernet 0
frequency 30
ip sla schedule 1 life forever start-time now

 

track 1 ip sla 1 reachability
 delay down 40 up 10

 

Ping every 30 seconds, track delay 40 so get 2 ping failures before say it is down.

 

HTH

 

View solution in original post

the delay should be longer than the timeout so you know the ping has
failed.You can adjust the timeout


*(config-ip-sla-echo)#timeout ? <0-604800000> Timeout in milliseconds*
So say you ping every 5 seconds and adjust the timeout to 3 seconds
then lets say a ping fails and we set the tracking delay to 9 seconds, so
that ensures that 2 consecutive pings have failed before you say it is
down, and it will come up after the delay in the up time after a
successful ping.

View solution in original post

6 Replies 6

Hi these are the typical settings I use and don't get any problems

 

ip sla 1
icmp-echo 110.145.65.1 source-interface Ethernet 0
frequency 30
ip sla schedule 1 life forever start-time now

 

track 1 ip sla 1 reachability
 delay down 40 up 10

 

Ping every 30 seconds, track delay 40 so get 2 ping failures before say it is down.

 

HTH

 

Hi Richard,

 

Thanks for your response.

Does "delay down" overpower "timeout" in IP SLA? As I know the default timeout is 5000 ms.

and how did you work out the number of ping failures which is 2 in this case?

For me, a delay of 40 seconds is quite long. I prefer 10 seconds. Also can please you tell what "delay up 10" does?

 

Thanks

 

the delay should be longer than the timeout so you know the ping has
failed.You can adjust the timeout


*(config-ip-sla-echo)#timeout ? <0-604800000> Timeout in milliseconds*
So say you ping every 5 seconds and adjust the timeout to 3 seconds
then lets say a ping fails and we set the tracking delay to 9 seconds, so
that ensures that 2 consecutive pings have failed before you say it is
down, and it will come up after the delay in the up time after a
successful ping.

Thanks Richard,

It is clear for now. I'll test it on my client's router next week. 

Hi Richard,

As Cisco's recommendation
"Apart from the IP SLAs UDP jitter operation. For all other IP SLAs operations, the following configuration guideline is recommended:
(frequencyseconds ) > (timeoutmilliseconds ) > (thresholdmilliseconds )"
So I wonder that is there any potential problem if I set timeout value equal to frequency value?
For example:
ip sla 1
icmp-echo 110.145.65.1 source-interface Ethernet 0
frequency 5
timeout 5000
ip sla schedule 1 life forever start-time now

Cisco gives the following recommendation about the timeout value in its IP SLA Command Reference: "We recommend that the value of the milliseconds argument be based on the sum of both the maximum round-trip time (RTT) value for the packets and the processing time of the IP SLAs operation." It makes sense since it is the time after which we can reasonably conclude that the destination is unreachable.

It is nicely combined with the track delay which let us specify after how much "unreachable time" using IP SLA we should conclude that the track is down and thus that we have to react to correct the situation. We don't want to react too fast otherwise we will have a lot of Down/Up track state changes.

Getting Started

Find answers to your questions by entering keywords or phrases in the Search bar above. New here? Use these resources to familiarize yourself with the community:

Innovations in Cisco Full Stack Observability - A new webinar from Cisco