Service Assurance Agent

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Service Assurance Agent (SAA) is an active measurement technology initially developed by Cisco. SAA is sometimes also referred to as Application Performance Monitor (APM) or Response Time Responder (RTR). This technology was renamed IP Service Level Agreements

What SAA does

With SAA, routers and/or switches perform periodic measurements. These include:

HTTP Get
FTP downloads
DNS lookups
UDP Echo (for VoIP Jitter & MOS)
DLSw (SNA Tunneling protocol)
DHCP lease requests
TCP Connect
ICMP Echo (remote ping)

The exact number and type of available measurements depends on the IOS version. SAA enables building truly distributed performance collection systems. SAA is very widely used in service provider networks to generate time-based performance data. It is typically used together with SNMP and Netflow which generate volume-based data. SAA is often used to generate data which is need by Service Level Agreements.

Important things to know

For SAA measurements needs a device with SAA support. SAA is supported on Cisco routers and switches since IOS version 12.1. Other vendors like Juniper or Enterasys support SAA on some of their devices.
SAA measurements and data collection can be configured via the console (command line) or via SNMP.
When using SNMP, both read and write community strings are needed.
The SAA voice quality feature was added starting with IOS version 12.3(4)T. All versions after this including 12.4 mainline contain the MOS and ICPIF voice quality calculation for the SAA UDP jitter measurement.

Tools support

You need a software tool to plot SAA charts. SAA is widely supported by tools from different vendors. These include:

[Infosim StableNet]
[HP OV Performance Insight]
[Cisco Works IPM]

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