Improve your Wide Area Networks Performances

The current networks are increasingly used to convey applications requiring an perfect quality of service, particularly in terms of network latency and jitter. One difficulty of the monitoring is that the measures are generally taken directly from a central platform. Some measures don’t correspond to what would be obtained if we take the measurement from another point in the network, such as a remote site. In these cases, we end up with a quality of service as noted by some users, different from that measured and monitored through supervision.

Measurement of service level from end to end with Cisco IP SLA (SAA or Cisco IP)

In response to this need, the Cisco network equipment implement the IP / SLA (Service Level Agreement) technology. It makes it possible to “outsource” to some equipment the measurement, rather than taking them centrally, from a monitoring solution. So, we know the performance at all points within the network and end to end, for example, for measures between remote sites.

Network jitter measured between 2 remote switches on a WAN IP / MPLS

SmartReport collects and analyses these measures in order to produce the related reports, giving an accurate and reliable network performance at each site.

Using IP SLA in connection with an application deployment

The IP SLA technology is commonly used within the framework of the deployment and qualification process of an application. The number of applications deployments that are deferred due to network performance are estimated at about 40%. The purpose of the IP SLA is to make the measurement of network response time before an application deployment possible. More concretely, even before the deployment of the system and application infrastructure, we know the response time that the network application would have if it were in production. These information are used in the qualification phase, to validate that the network infrastructure is able to accommodate the application by offering the performance that it needs to function. They are also used in other phases of the project, including the receipt and phases of support and exploitation.