Cisco Cisco MGX-FRSM-HS2 B Serial Frame Service Module 白書

 

 

White Paper 

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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Troubleshooting with Network Analysis Module  

The Cisco

®

 Network Analysis Module (NAM) provides visibility into how the network is performing and how users 

experience the applications and services delivered over the network. 

NAM delivers granular traffic analysis, rich application performance measurements, comprehensive voice quality 

monitoring, and deep insightful packet captures to help improve network performance. 

Cisco NAM is available in an integrated services module and virtual blade and appliance form factors to address 

diverse monitoring needs throughout the Cisco network: the data center, the branch, the campus core, aggregation, 

and even closet locations. All form factors support the latest software version 4.2. 

Cisco NAM leverages the instrumentation in Cisco IOS

®

 Software such as Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN), Remote 

SPAN (RSPAN), Encapsulated Remote SPAN (ERSPAN), NetFlow Data Export (NDE), Remote Monitoring (RMON), 

and network-based application recognition as the data source. 

The following sections will cover proactive alert configurations and troubleshooting steps for application performance; 

host, conversation, and interface utilization; Differentiated Services (DiffServ); and voice issues. 

With Cisco NAM deployed in different places in the network collecting and analyzing the network traffic, it becomes a 

very valuable tool for alerting and troubleshooting issues. NAM can be configured with thresholds to trigger alerts and 

capture packets when the thresholds are exceeded. 

Intelligent application performance (IAP) monitoring is a key feature that NAM provides: an ability to measure the 

response time of transactions between the client and server. 

The IAP toolkit is powerful, providing 45 metrics into application response times and network latency. Becoming 

familiar with the metrics that are important to your network will provide significant benefits in helping manage your 

network performance. The metrics can be found in Table 4-40 in the NAM user guide at 

. 

Providing a high-quality network experience to users located in branch locations that are geographically dispersed 

from data centers is one of the tougher challenges facing IT today. The trend toward data center consolidation has 

provided significant savings in resources and made data centers more robust and reliable. At the same time, this 

trend has pushed most enterprise users further away from the data center (typically, large, consolidated data centers 

are located in a few locations across the country and serve tens of thousands of users spread across offices in the 

country and the rest of the world). As a result, transaction-intensive (chatty) applications that were designed to 

communicate across a LAN are now forced to work across the WAN, resulting in poor performance. In short, while 

data center consolidation offers a host of benefits, it also raises issues around the experience of individual users. It is 

therefore critical for IT to measure user experience as perceived by users in each office and proactively manage 

network performance so that employee productivity remains unaffected irrespective of location.