Monitoring the Last Mile for the Account

This article offers an overview of the Last Mile Monitoring feature in the Cato Cloud.

Overview of Last Mile Monitoring

The Last Mile Monitoring feature lets you monitor the quality of ISP links between a Cato site and the PoP. You can use the Cato Management Application analytics to help diagnose connectivity issues and problems for a site. This feature sends ICMP packets to monitor connections to popular websites, such as google.com. These connections are outside of the DTLS tunnel to the Cato Cloud. If there is a connectivity problem, such as latency or packet loss, with these connections - then you know that the problem is not related to the Cato Cloud.

By default, this feature measures the quality for the ISP links to these destinations: facebook.com, google.com, and amazon.com. However, you also have the option to configure custom websites for the entire account or a specific site. The monitoring results for these destinations are available in: Network > Sites > Network Analytics with Last Mile Packet Loss and Last Mile Distance.

Example of Using Analytics to Monitor the Last Mile

Let's say that the Cato account for Alpha Cloud company had a problem with VoIP calls on October 24 close to 5:00 pm. The IT department is trying to locate the source of this problem to resolve it as quickly as possible. The admins review the last mile analytics for this time period and see the following data:

LastMile.png

This graph shows that there is a last mile latency packet loss of 12% for Facebook.com at 4:54 pm. Because the graph is showing traffic data that is not connected to the Cato Cloud, then the admins know that this problem is not related to Cato Networks. They can investigate if there is a problem with the internal network for the site, the ISP links, and so on.

Configuring Last Mile Monitoring for the Account

You can enable Last Mile Monitoring for the entire account and define the web site Destinations and ICMP test packet interval.

To configure Last Mile Monitoring for the account:

  1. From the navigation menu, click Network > Last Mile Monitoring.

    lastmile.png

  2. Select Enable last mile monitoring to enable the feature.

  3. In Test Interval (sec), select the number of seconds between ICMP test packets.

  4. Optional: Customize the website destinations you are monitoring:

    1. Click remove.png to remove a default destination.

    2. Click Domain_plus.png and start typing or select from FQDN, IP, or IP Port.

    3. Enter the value for the defined destination and press Enter.

  5. Click Save.

Configuring Last Mile Monitoring for a Specific Site

For each Socket site, you can configure specific settings for the Last Mile Monitoring feature. The settings for a specific site take precedence and override the settings for the entire account.

In addition, when you configure this feature for a site, you have the option to exclude one or more Socket interfaces. This means that the excluded interfaces are NOT monitored for last mile connectivity. For example, you can choose to exclude an interface that uses 4G/LTE links.

To configure Last Mile Monitoring for a site:

  1. From the navigation menu, click Network > Sites and select the site.

  2. From the navigation menu, click Site Settings > Last Mile Monitoring. The Last Mile Monitoring screen opens.

  3. Select Override Account Settings, to use only the Socket settings for this site.

  4. In Test Interval (sec), select the number of seconds between ICMP test packets.

  5. To configure a custom destination:

    1. Click Domain_plus.png and start typing or select from FQDN, IP and IP Port.

    2. Enter the value for the defined destination.

  6. To exclude interfaces from Last Mile Monitoring:

    1. From the Excluding option, click Add.

    2. In the pop-window, select the interfaces which are NOT sending ICMP test packets for link monitoring.

    3. Click OK.

  7. Click Save.

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