Performance Management Overview

In performance management (PM), the Connectivity Services Director application provides an option to measure the frame delay, frame loss, frame delay variation, and service availability. These measurements are achieved in either of the following ways:

• Triggering a one-way delay

• Triggering a two-way delay

• Loss

The performance measurement is useful for generating periodic service level agreement conformance reports from the deployed network and for studying traffic patterns in the network over a period of time.

Monitoring Performance Statistics

The PM statistics can be collected in the following two ways:

1. On-Demand Mode

2. Proactive Mode

On-Demand Mode

In on-demand mode, you can trigger the measurements. You can also collect loss measurement (ETH-LM) and delay measurements (ETH-DM).

Loss Measurement

The frame loss is calculated by collecting the counter values applicable for ingress and egress service frames. The counters maintain a count of transmitted and received data frames between a pair of MEPs. The loss measurement statistics are retrieved as the output of the monitor ethernet loss-measurement command and are also stored at the initiator. The frame counts are stored at both the initiator and the receiver MEPs for later retrieval.

The on-demand loss measurement statistics is collected for E-Line service only. There are two linear charts: Near-End-CIR and Far-End-CIR. For each interval, the graph plots three values: Average case, best case, and worst case frame loss.

Delay Measurement

To start an ethernet frame delay measurement session, the router initiates an exchange of frames carrying one-way or two-way frame delay measurement protocol data units (PDUs) between the local and remote MEPs. Ethernet frame delay measurement statistics are measured and stored at only one of the MEPs.

For one-way ethernet frame delay measurement, only the receiver MEP (on the remote system) collects statistics. For two-way Ethernet frame delay measurement, only the initiator MEP (on the local system) collects statistics.

The on-demand delay measurement statistics are collected for E-Line and E-LAN services. Either the one-way or two-way delay measurements statistics are collected for the services at a given point of time. For each interval, the graph plots three value: Average delay, best case delay and worst case delay.

Proactive Mode

In this mode SLA measurements are triggered by an iterator application. The proactive performance monitoring is supported only on VPWS and E-LAN.

Performance Management of Test Traffic

The Connectivity Services Director application enables you to create Threshold Crossing Alert (TCA) Profiles to apply service level agreement (SLA) parameters to test traffic as defined by the following standards:

• L2 Ethernet OAM/ ITU-T Y.1731

• RFC2544

Specifically, the parameters are:

• Bandwidth Utilization

• Delay

• Delay Variation—Jitter

• Frame Loss

• Throughput

See Creating a TCA Profile.