Network Assessment Help

[mohd abdul malik]

Hi,

One of our client having issue with their Oracle application.

Whenever the oracle clients at a branch are filling the forms or making queries their queries and forms are taking 4-5 minutes to bring results.

now the issue is the application team is blaming the network team and the network team is blaming the application team and here we are to

make an assessment on the network.

They are using cisco router 2911 on the HO and the 2801 on the branch.

The branch and HO are connected with a Wireless point to point link with a bandwidth of 11 Mbps as Primary and an MPLS link of 4 Mbps as Secondary.

The wireless link give a delay of 30-40 msec and the MPLS link gives a delay about 60-100 msec.

Q) Now what tools and procedures can i use to find out if there is any issues with the network.

It would be really helpful if someone can provide detailed steps to the network assessment procedure.

[Edison Ortiz]

You can setup IP SLA in the routers
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_4/ip_sla/configuration/guide/hsthresh.html
and determine if there are packet drops end-to-end which may affect the application. A simple ping is not sufficient, you need some trending analysis.

[mohd abdul malik]

Thanks for the reply, the link you gave me looks good.

I would also like to know What more options do we have to find a solution to this assessment.

Do we get any third party softwares that can determine things for me.

[jlittlejohn]

You can use myITassessment.com.

It provides a comprehensive assessment, and also allows you to do simulation of traffic. info.myitassessment.com/trafficsim shows the simulation details.

Cisco utilizes this platform to do UC and Data Center assessments, and you can see other partners here:

http://www.myitassessment.com/ServiceProviders/

You can see sample reports of our output, etc, at www.myitassessment.com

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

I realize you're asking about assessment procedures, but from what you've described, if you're not shaping for your wireless and MPLS connections, you probably should, and if you're using global FIFO queuing, you should consider using FQ.

Your noted overall delays seem high and the deltas between them (the two paths) seems high too.

Wireless links aren't always as transmission reliable as wired links.  Assuming an assessment reveals a higher BER rate, you might want use adjust-mss to decrease TCP packet sizes across that link.

[catalystexpress]

You may also want to consider wan optimization there are many products in the market, as far as i know oracle is a notoriously poor application for use over a WAN and something like Riverbed is probably the only fix, for now as suggested by Joseph you may want to TRYQoS(LLQ) then set priority queue  and put the application into the priority q

cheers..