Broadband service delivery technologies have enabled the introduction of broadband service termination applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP), TV service delivery, and video and high-speed Internet services. These new applications force carriers to produce services where the health and quality of Service Level Agreement (SLA) commitments are verifiable, both to the customer and internally (within the carrier).
SAA is a feature that monitors network operations using statistics for parameters such as latency, jitter, response time, and packet loss. The information can be used to troubleshoot network problems and help in problem prevention and network topology planning. The 7705 SAR also supports the following SAA Ethernet CFM tests: loopback, linktrace, two-way delay measurement, and two-way SLM.
The results are saved in SNMP tables that are queried by either the CLI or a management system. Threshold monitors allow for both rising and falling threshold events to alert the provider if SLA performance statistics deviate from the required parameters. SAA CFM tests can be saved to accounting files that can be accessed by the network management system.
SAA allows two-way timing for several applications. This provides carriers and their customers with data to verify that the SLA agreements are being properly enforced. For SAA ICMP ping, one-way timestamping can be enabled at the system level for all outbound SAA ICMP ping packets.