Nowadays, video traffic on the network has become as prominent on the network as data and voice. One of the major contributing factors to this is the increasing adoption of video for meetings, conferencing etc. There are a lot of vendors in the market that provide video hosting services for such purposes.
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.
We have discussed in our earlier blogs about video traffic monitoring using Cisco Medianet and Mediatrace in NetFlow Analyzer. These features will help us to identify performance of video traffic on the network after it is implemented on a network.
When it comes video implementation on the network, the network administrator has a huge responsibility 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.
Here comes the Cisco IP SLA VO(Video) feature to help the network administrator verify the video traffic handling capabilities of the network.
What is 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 over head 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 cost 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 and NetFlow Analyzer:
Cisco IP SLA VoIP and WAN RTT reporting is already available in NetFlow Analyzer. From our next version you can see Cisco IP SLA VO reports in NetFlow Analyzer.
You can also analyze simulated video traffic by IP SLA VO with Cisco Medianet and Mediatrace feature and found metrics like Jitter, latency, packet loss and MOS.
NetFlow Analyzer, with all these Cisco supporting features and reporting capabilities helps networkers to effectively manage their network by ensuring high availability.
Reference :-
http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/medianet/docs/IP_SLA_Video_Operation_Across_Platforms.pdf
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Praveen Kumar
NetFlow Analyzer Technical Team
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The original article/video can be found at Network Performance Analysis using Cisco IP SLA VO