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Traffic and Performance Visibility for Cisco Live 2010, Barcelona
Background
Cisco
®
Live is Cisco's annual premier education and training event for IT, networking, and communications
professionals. Cisco Live 2010, Barcelona was held at the Centre Convencions Internacional Barcelona from
January 26 to January 28 with a total attendance of more than 3,000 people.
Challenge
Unlike a traditional corporate network, the Cisco Live network is built up and fully operational in a matter of days. The
Cisco Live network offers many advanced services including Cisco TelePresence
™
, video surveillance, IPv6, and
voice over IP. The network provides connectivity for the various Cisco and partner technology demonstrations, labs,
streaming video of the technical sessions, and wireless access for all the attendees. With so many activities
dependent on the network, the availability, reliability, and performance of the network are crucial to the success of
the event. Hence, from a network operations perspective, visibility into network usage and performance are critical.
Solution
Cisco
®
Network Analysis Module (NAM) SVC-NAM-2 service module running version 4.1 software was installed in
the core Cisco Catalyst
®
6500 Series Switch to deliver granular traffic analysis, rich application performance
measurements, comprehensive voice quality monitoring, and deep insightful packet captures to help monitor and
troubleshoot network performance.
Cisco NAM Setup
The Cisco Live network had 42 VLANs configured. There were different VLANs for users, partners, demonstrations,
labs, voice, wireless, management, and so on. Traffic from all 42 VLANs with a total of about 300 Mbps was set up to
connect to the NAM using Switch Point Analyzer (SPAN) for analysis using the integrated data source configuration
menu available in the NAM web-based graphical user interface (GUI). Various monitoring capabilities, such as core
monitoring, voice and RTP steam monitoring, response time monitoring, Differentiated Services (DiffServ)
monitoring, URL monitoring, and chassis parameters (switch health and port statistics) monitoring was enabled on
the NAM. All this setup took less than 10 minutes and made the NAM ready to begin monitoring the network.
Traffic Analysis with Cisco NAM
The NAM overview screen provided a real-time view into who was using the network, which applications they were
using, and how much network resources were being consumed. An initial look at the NAM traffic overview screen
indicated that RTP, HTTP, and RTSP traffic was consuming the most bandwidth in the network core. Additionally the
most active hosts in the network were identified as belonging to the 10.31.x.x and 10.32.x.x subnets, which included
the servers hosting the Cisco Live content (Figure 1).