What is Probe

Service level agreements (SLAs) allow networked services established between providers and their customers to operate according to the conditions defined in the SLA. Measurement mechanisms can be used to support SLA monitoring. However, these mechanisms are expensive in terms of resource consumption. In addition, if the number of SLA violations at any given time is greater than the available measurement sessions, some violations will likely be missed. The current best practice is to observe just a subset of network destinations based upon the expertise of a few human administrators. Such observation mode is error prone, reactive, and scales poorly. Such practice can lead to SLA violations being missed, which hampers the reliability of the SLA monitoring process. In this context, the use of autonomic network features can improve such processes, especially when these features are deployed in a decentralized manner. The use of these autonomic features is described in RFC 8316. The authors expect that such a document can lead to better SLA monitoring tools and methods.