SLA monitoring of MPLS service

Question

Hi Guys..we have MPLS links to about 5 offices around the globe, Bandwidth is around 2 mb across all links, managed by a single ISP. Now we have had various outages recently and we do not have transparency of the average bandwidth. The ISP has his own portal but it doesn't work when needed the most. They have an option where we can pay for getting SNMP feeds but there is no provisioning for capturing Netflow. I guess thay use that for their own portal purposes.
The routers at the CPE side (our side), are managed by the ISP.
What tools/applications I can use on my side to maintain visibility over the MPLS links provided to us?

Answer 1

Hi,
You can make use of the "IP SLA" features between your CPE devices. Though CPE's are connected via MPLS VPN network the enterprise network (your network)is actually unaware of MPLS technology and all you need for IP SLA to work is the ip reachability between devices. CPE to CPE "IP SLA" can be configured which will give you lot of informations that can be gathered. It also has MIB and OID values associated with it. So you can use a free network monitoring tool with OID values so that you can even view the pictorial presentation of your network uptime and lot of performance parameters (jitter, packet loss, latency, etc.)
You can get some insight to "IP SLA":
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps6537/ps6555/ps6602/prod_presentation0900aecd8047bab5.pdf
HTH.. Pls rate if useful..
cheers
Arun Kumar