Performance Management (Best Practices)

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Performance Management(Best Practices)

• REFwww.cisco.com
• Document ID 15115

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Introduction

• Performance Management involves optimization of
  network response time and management of
  consistency and quality of individual and overall
  network services
• Need to measure the user/application response time

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Performance management issues

• User performance
• Application performance
• Capacity planning
• Proactive fault management
• It is important to note that with newer
  application like video and voice performance
  management is the key success

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Indicators for performance management (1/3)

• Document the network management business
  objectives
• Create detailed and measurable service level
  objectives
• Provide documentation the service level agreement
  (SLA) with charts or graphs that show the success
  or failure of how these agreements are met over
  the time

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Indicators for performance management (2/3)

• Collect a list of the variables for the baseline
  such as polling interval, network management
  overhead incurred, possible trigger threshold
• Have a periodic meeting that reviews the analysis
  of the baseline and trends.

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Indicators for performance management (3/3)

• Have a what-if analysis methodology documented.
• When thresholds are exceed, develop documentation
  on the methodology used to increase network
  resources.

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Performance management process flow (1/3)
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Performance management process flow (1/3)

• 1 develop a network management concept of
  operation
• Define the required features Services,
  Scalability and Availability objectives
• Define availability and network management
  objectives
• Define performance SLAs and Metrics
• Define SLA

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Performance management process flow (2/3)

• 2 Measure Performance
• Gather network baseline data
• Measure availability
• Measure response time
• Measure accuracy
• Measure utilization
• Capacity planning

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Performance management process flow (3/3)

• 3 perform a proactive fault analysis
• Use threshold for proactive fault management
• Network management implementation
• Network operation metrics

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Performance management process flow
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Develop a network management concept of operation
(1/3)

• The purpose is to describe the overall desired
  system characteristics from an operational
  standpoint
• The use of this document is to coordinate the
  overall business goals of network operation,
  engineering, design other business units and the
  end users.

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Define the required features Services,
Scalability objectives (1/2)

• Define services objectivesWhat services the
  network provide
• to understand applications, basic traffic flows,
  users and site counts
• Define scalability objectives How many users to
  use the network, also the capacity consumed on
  the network
• media capacity, number of routes and users

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Define the required features Services,
Scalability objectives (2/2)

• These are the standard performance goals
• Response time
• Utilization
• Throughput
• Capacity (maximum throughput rate)

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Define availability and network management
objectives (1/2)

• Define Availability objectives
• define the level of services (service level
  requirements)
• define different class of service for a
  particular organization
• Higher availability objective might necessitate
  increased redundancy and support procedures

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Define availability and network management
objectives (2/2)

• Define manageability objectives
• To ensure that overall network management does
  not lack management functionality
• Must understand the process and tools for
  organization
• Uncover all important MIB or network tool
  information

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Define performance SLAs and Metrics

• The performance SLAs metrics such as
• average expected volume of traffic,
• peak volume of traffic,
• average response time and maximum response time
  allowed
• Availability
• Down Time

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Define SLAs

• SLA (Service Level Agreement) - enterprise
• SLM (Service Level Management) service provider
  
• SLM include definitions for problem types and
  severity and help desk responsibilities
• Escalation path, time before escalation at each
  tier support level
• Time to start work on the problem
• Time to close target based on priority
• Service to provide in the area of capacity
  planning, hardware replacement

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Performance management process flow
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Measure Performance

• Gather Network Baseline data
• Perform a baseline of the network before and
  after a new solution deployment
• A typical router/switch baseline report includes
  capacity issues related to CPU, memory, buffer,
  link/media utilization, throughput
• Application baseline bandwidth used by app per
  time period

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Measure availability

• Availability is the the measure of time for which
  a network system or application is available to a
  user
• Coordinate the help desk phone calls with the
  statistics collected from managed devices
• Check scheduled outages
• Etc

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Measure Response Time

• Network response time is the time required to
  travel between two points
• Simple level pings from the network management
  station to key points I the network. (not
  accuracy)
• Server-centric polling SAA (Service Assurance
  Agent) on router (Cisco) to measure response time
  to a destination device
• Generate traffic that resembles the particular
  application or technology of interest

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Measure accuracy

• Accuracy is the measure of interface traffic that
  does not result in error and can be expressed in
  term of percentage
• Accuracy 100 error rate
• Error rate ifInErrors 100 / (ifInUcastPkts
  IfInNUcastPkts)

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Measure Utilization (1)

• Utilization measure the use of a particular
  resource over time
• Percentage in which the usage of a resource is
  compared with its maximum operational capacity
• High utilization is not necessarily bad
• Sudden jump in utilization can indicate unnormal
  condition

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Measure Utilization (2)

• Input utilization
• ifInOctets 8100/(time in second)ifSpeed
• Output Utilization
• ifOutOctets 8100/(time in second)ifSpeed

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Capacity planning

• The following are potential areas for concern
• CPU
• Backplane or I/O
• Memory
• Interface and pip sizes
• Queuing, latency and jitter
• Speed and distance
• Application characteristics

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Performance management process flow
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Perform a Proactive fault analysis

• One method to perform fault management is through
  the use of RMON alarms and event groups
• Distributed management system that enables
  polling at a local level with aggregation of data
  at a manager to manager

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Use threshold for proactive fault management (1/2)

• Threshold is the point of interest in specific
  data stream and generate event when threshold is
  triggered
• 2 classes of threshold for numeric data
• Continuous threshold apply to continuous or time
  series data such as data stored in SNMP counter
  or gauges
• Discrete threshold apply to enumerated objects or
  discrete numeric data such as Boolean objects

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Use threshold for proactive fault management (2/2)

• 2 different forms of continuous threshold
• Absolute use with gauges
• Relative (delta) use with counter
• Step to determine threshold
• 1 select the objects
• 2 select the devices and interfaces
• 3 determine the threshold values for each object
  or interface
• 4 determine the severity for the event generated
  by each threshold

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Network management implementation

• The organization should have an implemented
  network management system.
• SNMP/RMON or other network management system tools