Traffic Valuation and Prioritization

How often do you need to manage your traffic to ensure that your valuable users get adequate levels of service, and other users don't take up excessive resources?

Zeus' 'Traffic Valuation and Prioritization' white paper describes how to do exactly this, using TrafficScript to construct powerful service policies, and drawing on the capabilities of ZXTM to inspect and prioritize your traffic in a wide variety of ways.

The problems

The white paper describes techniques to address the following problems:

• "I want to guarantee certain levels of service for certain users."
• "I want to prioritize some transactions over others."
• "I want to restrict the activities of certain users."

Designing the policies

It explains that to address these problems, an administrator must consider the following questions:

1. Under what circumstances do you want the policy to take effect?
2. How do you wish to categorise your users?
3. How do you wish to apply the differentiation?

Solving the problems

TrafficScript rules are used to apply the policy. They use the following ZXTM features:

• Service Level Monitoring – Measure system performance, and apply policies only when they are needed.
• Custom Logging - Log and analyse activity to record and validate policy decisions.
• Application traffic inspection - Determine source, user, content, value; XML processing with XPath searches and calculations.
• Request Rate Shaping - Apply fine-grained rate limits for transactions.
• Bandwidth Control - Allocate and reserve bandwidth.
• Traffic Routing and Termination - Route high and low priority traffic differently; Terminate undesired requests.

You can find the Traffic Valuation and Prioritization white paper on www.zeus.com.

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 06 October 2006