Quality of Service (QoS) in Cisco Networks is a set of technologies and practices designed to manage traffic and ensure that various network services meet performance requirements. Cisco’s QoS involves prioritizing certain types of network traffic over others to ensure that critical applications like voice and video conferencing receive the bandwidth and low latency they need to function properly, especially in times of network congestion.
Key components of Cisco QoS include:
Classification and Marking: Identifying traffic types and marking them for differential handling. This process involves inspecting packets and assigning them to different classes based on policies.
Queuing: Managing traffic congestion and ensuring the prioritized handling of higher-class traffic. This involves algorithms like Priority Queuing, Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ), and Class-Based Weighted Fair Queuing (CBWFQ).
Congestion Management and Avoidance: Using tools like Tail Drop or Random Early Detection (RED) to prevent network congestion by managing traffic flow and discarding packets in a controlled manner.
Traffic Shaping and Policing: Regulating the traffic flow to conform to defined bandwidth limits. Traffic shaping smooths out traffic flow, while policing drops traffic exceeding the specified rate.
Link Efficiency Mechanisms: Techniques such as Link Fragmentation and Interleaving (LFI) and compression methods to improve the efficiency of the network link.
The integration periodically polls the Cisco device for the selected MIB objects. The collected data shows the performance and usage statistics of different QoS policies, allowing network administrators to analyze traffic patterns, verify QoS policy effectiveness, and make adjustments as needed.
The Cisco Class-based Quality of Service integration monitors the statistics of class-based traffic policing on your SNMP-enabled Cisco devices. Class-based policing allows you to control the maximum rate of traffic that is transmitted or received on an interface. You can observe the various classes of network traffic flowing through their device, both pre- and post-policy, as well as how different policies affect this traffic.
