Networking 101—Why You Need QoS to Simplify Troubleshooting Network Traffic Issues
No matter what bandwidth monitoring solution you use to enhance network availability, you will find the network is often riddled with issues pertaining to latency, packet loss, and jitter. To avoid unwanted traffic from interrupting key processes in your network, look for a way to safeguard your business critical applications by prioritizing them. Implementing and monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) policies can ensure optimal application and network performance, and help network admins weed out any unwanted traffic consuming a bulk of your bandwidth.
Why Should You Implement and Monitor QoS?
Quality of Service (QoS) is a set of policies that help network administrators prioritize network traffic for applications based on business impact, and guarantees enough bandwidth to ensure high network performance. It’s a mechanism that’s internal to network devices and determines which traffic gets preferential access to network resources.
Additionally, QoS is fundamental in efficiently handling traffic. A network that doesn’t have QoS policies runs with a best-effort delivery, meaning all traffic is routed with equal priority. In times of low network traffic, there typically won’t be any problems, however, what happens when traffic is heavy and congested?
Without a QoS policy, all network traffic packets have an equal chance of being dropped. A QoS policy will prioritize specific traffic according to its relative importance and application type, and use congestion-avoidance to ensure its delivery. For instance, under congestion a network device might choose to queue the traffic of applications that are more latency-tolerant. In turn, allowing traffic of applications that are less latency-tolerant to be forwarded immediately to the next network device, such as streaming media/videos, IP TV, VoIP, etc.
How does QoS Help You in Troubleshooting?
Most network administrators implement QoS policies to make sure their business-critical applications always receive the highest priority. Additionally, QoS monitoring helps to enhance your network monitoring ability, allowing you to adjust your policies based on your priorities and can also aid in troubleshooting.
Advanced network monitoring software allows you to view network traffic segmented by class of service methods, by monitoring NetFlow data. By using Class based Quality of Service or CBQoS in network monitoring software, you can measure the effectiveness of your QoS policies, and quantify bandwidth consumption by class map.
Avoid a network riddled with latency, packet loss, and jitter issues. Implement QoS to ensure sufficient network bandwidth is available for business critical IT applications. More importantly, keep a lid on unwanted traffic that could possibly consume your network.
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