Monitor Network Service Quality by using RMON

Setting Thresholds

By setting a rising and a falling threshold for a monitored variable, you can be alerted whenever the value of the variable falls outside of the allowable operational range. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1: Setting Thresholds

Events are only generated when the threshold is first crossed in any one direction rather than after each sample period. For example, if a rising threshold crossing event is raised, no more threshold crossing events will occur until a corresponding falling event. This considerably reduces the quantity of alarms that are produced by the system, making it easier for operations staff to react when alarms do occur.

To configure remote monitoring, specify the following pieces of information:

• The variable to be monitored (by its SNMP object identifier)

• The length of time between each inspection

• A rising threshold

• A falling threshold

• A rising event

• A falling event

Before you can successfully configure remote monitoring, you should identify what variables need to be monitored and their allowable operational range. This requires some period of baselining to determine the allowable operational ranges. An initial baseline period of at least three months is not unusual when first identifying the operational ranges and defining thresholds, but baseline monitoring should continue over the life span of each monitored variable.

RMON Command-Line Interface

Junos OS provides two mechanisms that you use to control the Remote Monitoring agent on the router: command-line interface (CLI) and SNMP. To configure an RMON entry using the CLI, include the following statements at the [edit snmp] hierarchy level:

If you do not have CLI access, you can configure remote monitoring using the SNMP Manager or management application, assuming SNMP access has been granted. (See Table 1.) To configure RMON using SNMP, perform SNMP Set requests to the RMON event and alarm tables.

RMON Event Table

Set up an event for each type that you want to generate. For example, you could have two generic events, rising and falling, or many different events for each variable that is being monitored (for example, temperature rising event, temperature falling event, firewall hit event, interface utilization event, and so on). Once the events have been configured, you do not need to update them.

RMON Alarm Table

The RMON alarm table stores the SNMP object identifiers (including their instances) of the variables that are being monitored, together with any rising and falling thresholds and their corresponding event indexes. To create an RMON request, specify the fields shown in Table 2.

Both the alarmStatus and eventStatus fields are entryStatus primitives, as defined in RFC 2579, Textual Conventions for SMIv2.

Troubleshoot RMON

You troubleshoot the RMON agent, rmopd, that runs on the router by inspecting the contents of the Juniper Networks enterprise RMON MIB, jnxRmon, which provides the extensions listed in Table 3 to the RFC 2819 alarmTable.

Monitoring the extensions in this table provides clues as to why remote alarms may not behave as expected.

Measurement Points

Defining the measurement points where metrics are measured is equally as important as defining the metrics themselves. This section describes measurement points within the context of this chapter and helps identify where measurements can be taken from a service provider network. It is important to understand exactly where a measurement point is. Measurement points are vital to understanding the implication of what the actual measurement means.

An IP network consists of a collection of routers connected by physical links that are all running the Internet Protocol. You can view the network as a collection of routers with an ingress (entry) point and an egress (exit) point. See Figure 2.

• Network-centric measurements are taken at measurement points that most closely map to the ingress and egress points for the network itself. For example, to measure delay across the provider network from Site A to Site B, the measurement points should be the ingress point to the provider network at Site A and the egress point at Site B.

• Router-centric measurements are taken directly from the routers themselves, but be careful to ensure that the correct router subcomponents have been identified in advance.

Figure 2: Network Entry Points

Basic Key Performance Indicators

For example, you could monitor a service provider network for three basic key performance indicators (KPIs):

• measures the “reachability” of one measurement point from another measurement point at the network layer (for example, using ICMP ping). The underlying routing and transport infrastructure of the provider network will support the availability measurements, with failures highlighted as unavailability.

• measures the number and type of errors that are occurring on the provider network, and can consist of both router-centric and network-centric measurements, such as hardware failures or packet loss.

• of the provider network measures how well it can support IP services (for example, in terms of delay or utilization).

Setting Baselines

How well is the provider network performing? We recommend an initial three-month period of monitoring to identify a network’s normal operational parameters. With this information, you can recognize exceptions and identify abnormal behavior. You should continue baseline monitoring for the lifetime of each measured metric. Over time, you must be able to recognize performance trends and growth patterns.

Within the context of this chapter, many of the metrics identified do not have an allowable operational range associated with them. In most cases, you cannot identify the allowable operational range until you have determined a baseline for the actual variable on a specific network.

Define Network Availability

Availability of a service provider’s IP network can be thought of as the reachability between the regional points of presence (POP), as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Regional Points of Presence

With the example above, when you use a full mesh of measurement points, where every POP measures the availability to every other POP, you can calculate the total availability of the service provider’s network. This KPI can also be used to help monitor the service level of the network, and can be used by the service provider and its customers to determine if they are operating within the terms of their service-level agreement (SLA).

Where a POP may consist of multiple routers, take measurements to each router as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Measurements to Each Router

Measurements include:

• Path availability—Availability of an egress interface B1 as seen from an ingress interface A1.

• Router availability—Percentage of path availability of all measured paths terminating on the router.

• POP availability—Percentage of router availability between any two regional POPs, A and B.

• Network availability—Percentage of POP availability for all regional POPs in the service provider’s network.

To measure POP availability of POP A to POP B in Figure 4, you must measure the following four paths:

Measuring availability from POP B to POP A would require a further four measurements, and so on.

A full mesh of availability measurements can generate significant management traffic. From the sample diagram above:

• Each POP has two co-located provider edge (PE) routers, each with 2xSTM1 interfaces, for a total of 18 PE routers and 36xSTM1 interfaces.

• There are six core provider (P) routers, four with 2xSTM4 and 3xSTM1 interfaces each, and two with 3xSTM4 and 3xSTM1 interfaces each.

This makes a total of 68 interfaces. A full mesh of paths between every interface is:

[n x (n–l)] / 2 gives [68 x (68–1)] / 2=2278 paths

To reduce management traffic on the service provider’s network, instead of generating a full mesh of interface availability tests (for example, from each interface to every other interface), you can measure from each router’s loopback address. This reduces the number of availability measurements required to a total of one for each router, or:

[n x (n–1)] / 2 gives [24 x (24–1)] / 2=276 measurements

This measures availability from each router to every other router.

Measure Availability

There are two methods you can use to measure availability:

• Proactive—Availability is automatically measured as often as possible by an operational support system.

• Reactive—Availability is recorded by a Help desk when a fault is first reported by a user or a fault monitoring system.

This section discusses real-time performance monitoring as a proactive monitoring solution.

Measure Class of Service

You can use class-of-service (CoS) mechanisms to regulate how certain classes of packets are handled within your network during times of peak congestion. Typically you must perform the following steps when implementing a CoS mechanism:

• Identify the type of packets that is applied to this class. For example, include all customer traffic from a specific ingress edge interface within one class, or include all packets of a particular protocol such as voice over IP (VoIP).

• Identify the required deterministic behavior for each class. For example, if VoIP is important, give VoIP traffic the highest priority during times of network congestion. Conversely, you can downgrade the importance of Web traffic during congestion, as it may not impact customers too much.

With this information, you can configure mechanisms at the network ingress to monitor, mark, and police traffic classes. Marked traffic can then be handled in a more deterministic way at egress interfaces, typically by applying different queuing mechanisms for each class during times of network congestion. You can collect information from the network to provide customers with reports showing how the network is behaving during times of congestion. (See Figure 5.)

Figure 5: Network Behavior During Congestion

To generate these reports, routers must provide the following information:

• Submitted traffic—Amount of traffic received per class.

• Delivered traffic—Amount of traffic transmitted per class.

• Dropped traffic—Amount of traffic dropped because of CoS limits.

The following section outlines how this information is provided by Juniper Networks routers.

Inbound Firewall Filter Counters per Class

Firewall filter counters are a very flexible mechanism you can use to match and count inbound traffic per class, per interface. For example:

For example, Table 8 shows additional filters used to match the other classes.

Any packet with a CoS DiffServ code point (DSCP) conforming to RFC 2474 can be counted in this way. The Juniper Networks enterprise-specific Firewall Filter MIB presents the counter information in the variables shown in Table 9.

This information can be collected by any SNMP management application that supports SNMPv2. Products from vendors such as Concord Communications, Inc., and InfoVista, Inc., provide support for the Juniper Networks Firewall MIB with their native Juniper Networks device drivers.

Monitor Output Bytes per Queue

You can use the Juniper Networks enterprise ATM CoS MIB to monitor outbound traffic, per virtual circuit forwarding class, per interface. (See Table 10.)

Non-ATM interface counters are provided by the Juniper Networks enterprise-specific CoS MIB, which provides information shown in Table 11.

Calculate Dropped Traffic

You can calculate the amount of dropped traffic by subtracting the outbound traffic from the incoming traffic:

You can also select counters from the CoS MIB, as shown in Table 12.