Commercial Cisco Offerings

CiscoWorks offers a range of tools for probing, performance monitoring, and trending network parameters. The two main components that offer traffic analysis and trending are as follows:

• Internet Performance Monitor (IPM) Can monitor the performance of multiprotocol networks by measuring the latency, packet loss, errors, and availability of IP networks on a hop-by-hop (router-to-router) basis. IPM provides both real-time and historical reports.

• Service Assurance Agent (SAA) Is embedded within IOS devices, and can generate and analyze traffic to measure performance between Cisco IOS devices and the network. SAA provides a scalable and cost-effective solution for monitoring network parameters without deploying a dedicated performance-monitoring server. However, SAA only provides text reports that can be viewed using various show commands on the router. To view graphical reports, IPM must be configured to pull the information from SAA.