Using IP SLA in Your Network

Service level agreements (SLAs) between Enterprise IT departments and end-users provide service guarantees for business critical applications. These agreements require performance monitoring of the network on a continual basis. The IP SLA feature allows you to configure, schedule, and monitor end-to-end packet timing measurements.

Use these timing measurements to understand how each service is performing on you network and, if necessary, deploy additional network applications more effectively or troubleshoot existing applications.

IP SLA collects, aggregates, and provides the ability to store the statistics gathered from the timing measurements for each session request. IP SLA performs the session requests through the Tracked Object Manager‘s ICMP timing probe feature. The Tracked Object Manager transmits ICMP echo packets to the destination provided by IP SLA and reports the timing information back to IP SLA.

IP SLA uses the timing information to calculate round-trip delay. Additional information provided by the Tracked Object Manager indicates if a packet was lost or is out of order. IP SLA provides a small storage area to keep the timing information for statistical modeling of the network.