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March 7, 2003
Network QoS
I met earlier this week with Randy Weathermon from Cisco. Randy is one of the most knowledgeable people on QoS technology that I've meet from Cisco.
I don't think the meeting inspired confidence in our QoS project. I asked Randy about QoS design and management tools. There are plenty of good design tools and tutorials. But the only tools for monitoring, manageing and diagnosing QoS-enabled networks are a hodge-podge of kludges.
One problem I expect would be very common would be diagnosing a network performance problem that could be caused by a QoS node. Randy said that the only two solutions they have now are to use Internet Performance Monitor to externally measure per-hop QoS behavior. Once you identify the individual node (if that's possible), use the QoS Policy Manager to remove each policy and see if that fixes the problem. Time consuming and not exactly inspiring.
Looks like we have a lot of learning to do once we implement QoS in our network.
Posted by pete at March 7, 2003 10:57 PM