Understanding Service Validation
You can use a functional audit and a configuration audit to monitor the health of a service for any of the following reasons:
- You have just deployed a service and want to verify that it works before your customer starts to use it.
- You want to perform periodic verification that a service is functioning correctly.
- A customer has reported that a service is not functioning correctly and you need to find out what the problem is and fix it.
The following sections provide overview information about functional audit and configuration audit:
Functional Audit
A functional audit determines whether the service is up or down. It checks the control plane to ensure connectivity among endpoints and that the UNIs are functioning correctly. It also checks the data plane to verify packet transmission between each valid pair of endpoints in the service.
A functional audit works by running commands that perform verification and reporting relevant information to the user. The specific commands are different for checking the control plane and the data plane, and for verifying a point-to-point service or a VPLS service.
Summary information about the functional audit is available in the Manage Jobs screen of the Jobs Management workspace. More details are available in the Functional Audit Result screens, which are available from the Manage Services window of the Service Provisioning Workspace.
A Manage Jobs screen example screen follows.
The State field indicates whether the service is up or down. If the service is down, the Summary field provides some information about the problem.
The following sections describe the Functional Audit Results screens:
Point-to-Point Service Functional Audit
For a point-to-point service, a functional audit uses the get-12ckt-connection-information command to validate the control plane. The command runs on each service endpoint and checks for correct functioning of the pseudowire between the two N-PE devices and that the UNIs are operational.
To validate the data plane, a functional audit runs the request-ping-l2circuit-virtual-circuit command on each endpoint to check for correct packet transmission to and from the other endpoint. The command uses an OAM ping to simulate traffic between the endpoints. The data plane is functional if the number of packets transmitted from an endpoint is the same as the number received.
The Functional Audit Result screens show the results of these commands. They include an option to limit the display of information to test failures only. You can access this series of Functional Audit Result screens from the Manage Services screen:
- The Service status screen shows information about the service, including its operational status.
- The Endpoint Status screen shows information about a specific endpoint.
- The Control Plane Validation and Data Plane Validation screen shows the results of the control plane and data plane verification tests performed on a specific link between two endpoints in the service, as shown in the following example:
VPLS Service Functional Audit—Full Mesh or Hub and Spoke
For a multipoint-to-multipoint VPLS service or a point-to-multipoint VPLS service, a functional audit uses the get-vpls-connection-information command to validate the control plane. The command validates connectivity between each pair of endpoints for which the service specifies a connection. For a multipoint-to-multipoint service, the command runs once on each endpoint for each other endpoint in the service. For a spoke in a point-to-multipoint service, the command checks for connectivity with the hub, or runs once for each hub in a dual-hub configuration. For a hub in a point-to-multipoint service, the command runs once for each spoke and each additional hub.
To validate the data plane, a functional audit runs the request-ping-vpls-instance command on each endpoint. This command simulates traffic between the endpoint it runs on and each other endpoint for which the service specifies a connection. The data plane is functional if the number of packets transmitted from an endpoint is the same as the number received.
 | Note: Data plane validation of a VPLS service works for MX Series devices running Junos version 9.4 or later. If the service under audit contains an M Series device or an N-PE device running Junos version 9.2 or 9.3, the functional audit does not complete successfully and generates a message stating that functional audit is not supported on that platform. |
The Functional Audit Result screens show the results of these commands. They include an option to limit the display of information to test failures only. You can access this series of Functional Audit Result screens from the Manage Services screen:
- The Service status screen shows information about the service, including its operational status.
- The Endpoint Status screen shows information about a specific endpoint.
- The Control Plane Validation and Data Plane Validation screen shows the results of the control plane and data plane verification tests on a specific link between two endpoints in the service. The following example shows the output for one link in a point-to-multipoint service:
In this case, the service has three endpoints. The endpoint named ge-0/0/2.2 on device SanFrancisco is the hub. Endpoints ge-5/0/1.2 on Beijing-mx480-pe7 and ge-0/0/2.2 on SanJose are the spokes. This example shows the results of attempts to ping SanJose from SanFrancisco. The control plane and data plane are both shown to be operational.
The following example shows a similar output for a multipoint-to-multipoint service:
In this case, both the control plane validation test and the data plane validation test reported failures.
Configuration Audit
A configuration audit can help you determine whether the service configuration on the device has been changed out of band. To this end, you can compare the results of a configuration audit with the service configuration in the Junos Space database. The following example shows a sample comparison:
You can view the results of a configuration audit from the Manage Services screen. You can view the service configuration also from the Manage Services screen.
