NimBUS for Network Monitoring

NimBUS for Cisco IP Service Level Agreement (IP SLA) Monitoring

With the convergence of Voice, Video, and Data applications on the network, it is becoming increasingly important to monitor the performance to ensure quality of service (QoS) and Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. These applications are more susceptible to even the slightest changes and transmission characteristics of the network. It is imperative to understand the traffic characteristics of the network before and after deployment of new applications to ensure successful implementations and maintain service level compliance.

Primary Features:

• Measures delay, jitter and packet loss on the network
• Extensive traffic coverage (i.e. ICMP, HTTP, FTP, DNS, SNA, DHCP)
• Drag and drop configuration of IP SLA on Cisco devices

Additional Features:

• Monitors include:
  • RTT (round trip response time)
  • DNS
  • Echo
  • FTP
  • HTTP
  • Jitter
  • TCP Connect
  • UDP Echo
  • Network delay or latency
  • Packet loss
  • Network delay variation (jitter)
  • Availability
  • One-way latency
  • Website download time
  • Network statistics

Benefits

• Improved network availability and performance
• Accurate network monitoring using existing network infrastructure
• Ensure the network will support rollout of new applications (i.e. VoIP)
• Proactive notifications through email, pager, SMS

Cisco IP Service Level Agreement (IP SLA)
Cisco IP SLA is embedded software within Cisco IOS devices that generates and monitors traffic to measure performance between any combinations of network endpoints. Since the agents reside on Cisco devices, they have precise knowledge of the delays and can therefore provide very accurate performance measurements.

Both enterprises and service providers routinely deploy IP SLA for network performance statistics within IP networks that utilize Quality of Service (QoS), Voice over IP, Security, Virtual Private Network (VPNs), and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Configuring Cisco IP SLA is a difficult and time-consuming task. That is why many small, mid-size companies and some enterprise do not utilize this powerful monitoring feature. With the NimBUS for Cisco IP SLA probe, it has never been easier, with drag and drop configuration, data analyses and seamless use of the collected data in any NimBUS console, dashboard, performance and SLA report.

The NimBUS for Cisco IP SLA Probe provides an easy to use, scalable, and cost effective solution for configuring IP service level monitoring using your Cisco devices by utilizing the capabilities within Cisco IOS. IP SLA is supported on almost all Cisco IOS devices.

Part of the NimBUS family
NimBUS provides a comprehensive solution to improving the end-user experience. From monitoring the application response time at the desktop through to monitoring the performance and availability of the entire IT infrastructure including VoIP and other network-centric applications, NimBUS is the only product that can give you a complete 360-degree view of business critical services.

All NimBUS information is correlated to business service dashboards and measured against pre-defined Service Level Agreements to warn you against SLA threatening conditions. In addition to the NimBUS IP SLA Monitoring solution, modules exist for monitoring all other parts of your network infrastructure including routers, switches, firewalls, servers, databases, common applications, as well as environmental devices.

NimBUS is a rapidly deployed solution that requires minimal customization and administration.

NimBUS Dashboards for Cisco IP SLA
NimBUS Dashboards for Cisco IP SLA display real-time and historical network jitter performance, packet loss, round trip response time, CPU utilization, and more - all in a single view.

Cisco IP SLA Protocols and Services Monitored

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)
Measures the roundtrip time taken to discover a DHCP server and obtain a lease from it. The lease is then released after the operation.

DNS (Domain Name System)
Measures the time required to send a DNS request and receive a reply. If a hostname is specified, the operation queries for an IP, and vice versa.

Echo
Measures the time taken to send an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) message to a destination and receive a reply.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
This probe checks its configuration to determine if a reboot is needed and performs the reboot automatically.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
Measures the round trip time taken to connect and access data from a HTTP server.

Jitter
Measures the delay, delay variance, and packet loss in a network by generating synthetic UDP data. The operation sends a certain number of packets (specified by the "Packets" field), each of a certain size (specified by the "Packet size" field), a certain number of milliseconds apart. Requires a target which supports Cisco IP SLA agents.

UDPEcho
Measures the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) response time between the source and target. The target must be a device that supports UDP Echo Service (UDP port 7) or another IP SLA agent.

TCPConnect
Measures the time taken by the source to perform a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connect operation to the target device (which can be any IP device and does not necessarily need to support IP SLA). Specify the target port number to test a specific TCP protocol (i.e. 21 (ftp), 22 (ssh), 23 (telnet), 80 (http), etc.).