Performance Monitor; Mediatrace - Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Manual

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capabilities applicable to that area of the network and will continue to add new medianet functions as they become

available. This section will focus on two of the major medianet functions that are critical to the assessment of the

network infrastructure's ability to handle rich media services: Performance Monitor and Mediatrace.

Performance Monitor

Cisco Performance Monitor provides the ability to monitor the flow of packets in the network and to become aware

of any issues that might affect the flow before it starts to significantly affect the performance of the application in

question. Performance monitoring is especially important for video traffic because high-quality interactive video

traffic is highly sensitive to network issues. Performance Monitor is focused on Real-Time Protocol (RTP) headers

and provides real-time flow statistics for jitter, latency, and loss.

Cisco Performance Monitor uses software components and commands similar to those of Flexible NetFlow and

QoS MQC, as shown in Figure 23.

Figure 23.

Performance Monitor Overview

The configuration example in Figure 23 shows how Performance Monitor uses the flow exporter, flow record, and

flow monitor configurations found in Flexible NetFlow (discussed in the section prior to this one) to gather the flow

information. Then, using the QoS MQC configuration, it looks for traffic matching a particular metric, "rtp" flows in

this case, to determine if there are any issues with the network. Based on the analysis of the flows with regard to

the configured metric, Performance Monitor is able to display very detailed information that can be used by a

network administrator to determine what changes need to be made to guarantee a high-quality media

communication.

Cisco Mediatrace helps to isolate and troubleshoot network degradation problems, such as jitter, latency, and loss,

by enabling a network administrator to discover an IP flow's path, dynamically enable monitoring capabilities on

the nodes along the path, and collect information on a hop-by-hop basis. This information includes flow statistics,

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