By Ben Erwin
Product Manager, NetQoS.
Let’s face it, as far as company names go, NetQoSdoesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, unless you’re pronouncing it “Net-kose” instead of the correct pronunciation, “Net-Queue-Oh-Ess.” But obviously, QoS – Quality of Service – is an important concept in IT and so we thought we’d take a moment to explain a bit about the concept – and our name.
What is QoS? By classifying traffic into specific queues, network managers can rank and prioritize mission critical applications to improve latency, minimize jitter and packet loss.
Several QoS methods exist but the more common techniques include classifying (sometimes referred to as “tagging”) network traffic on the router or switch. Therefore, router/switch companies (such as Cisco) provide different methods for configuring QoS policies and monitoring their impact.
As a closely aligned Cisco technology partner, NetQoS supports multiple Cisco technologies capable of assessing the impact from QoS. In addition, the inherent network monitoringcapabilities within the NetQoS product suite, such as passive application response time monitoring, also provides QoS monitoring benefits.
For example, NetQoS SuperAgent assesses the impact of application response timeon mission critical applications, by monitoring TCP transactions from client to data center, which includes latency attributed by the wide area network (WAN). In addition, SuperAgent’s baselining capability allows you to create a profile of “normal” performance, which you can test against your changes in QoS policies – so you can prove the benefits of QoS to colleagues and management.
We also have a product, NetQoS NetVoyant, which works with Cisco IP SLA. It allows users to run synthetic tests between routers to calculate a varity of response time metrics over the WAN. In these tests, users can set different parameters, including the QoS level. The QoS parameter allows IP SLA users to test how QoS will impact response time metrics from router to router (i.e. over the WAN), prior to rolling out QoS on production applications. Once the measurements have been collected, NetVoyant can access the routers, extract the measurements, and report the results, visually.
Additionally, NetVoyant can track and visually report Cisco’s CBQoS, which provides a real-time status of how QoS has been deployed and performing on a given network device. Policy trees, input class maps, output class maps, pre-policy bit rates, post-policy bit rates, and traffic shaping statistics are just a few of the metrics that can be extracted from CBQoS.
Part of every Cisco router currently in production includes a technology called NetFlow, which exports IP layer detail for every conversation traversing the router. Part of this IP layer detail is the ToS bit which corresponds to a specific QoS queue. ToS bits (or DSCP bits) are used to tag or classify network traffic into specific queues. NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer, the traffic analysis module of the NetQoS Performance Center, collects NetFlow data and reports the associated volume, rate, and utilization metrics relevant to the network traffic. Therefore, users have full visibility into how applications are being classified on the network to verify QoS deployment strategies or utilization per queue.
So, as you can see, QoS is extremely important for managing application delivery – and that’s one of the reasons it’s part of our company name.
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