Overview

As user applications continue to drive network growth and complexity, supporting diverse types of traffic—especially for business-critical and delay-sensitive applications—has never been more essential. This course equips learners with in-demand skills to effectively manage Quality of Service (QoS) in converged networks, ensuring that priority applications receive the performance they require. You’ll explore the foundations of QoS, identify common network issues, and learn step-by-step methods for planning and implementing QoS using modern models like best-effort, IntServ, and DiffServ. What sets this course apart is its practical focus on Cisco’s Modular QoS CLI (MQC) and breakthrough AutoQoS tools, enabling both granular configuration and simplified deployment for different user needs. Through hands-on exercises, you’ll gain skills in class-based marking, monitoring QoS, and leveraging Cisco’s automation tools for both campus and WAN environments. By the end of the course, you’ll be confident in creating and maintaining QoS policies that optimize network performance and reliability—making you an invaluable asset in any network administration or architecture role.

Syllabus

Introduction to QoS and QoS Mechanisms Course Introduction
Introduction to QoS

As user applications continue to drive network growth and evolution, the demand to support various types of traffic is also increasing. Network traffic from business-critical and delay-sensitive applications must be serviced with priority and protected from other types of traffic. Quality of service (QoS) is a crucial element of any administrative policy that mandates how to handle application traffic on a network. QoS and its implementations in a converged network are complex and create many challenges for network administrators and architects. Many QoS building blocks or features operate at different parts of a network to create an end-to-end QoS system. Managing how these building blocks are assembled and how different QoS features are used can be a difficult task.

Implement and Monitor QoS

Cisco has simplified Quality of Service (QoS) configuration by logically grouping the various components of a QoS policy into reusable configuration modules. These modules constitute the Cisco modular QoS CLI (MQC), which allows network administrators and network implementers to deploy QoS easily. Cisco also provides many mechanisms that assist in the development and monitoring of QoS implementations. These mechanisms allow administrators to perform network discoveries that assist in planning QoS policy and provide monitoring statistics that are used to perform ongoing validation of QoS configurations. There are some instances, however, in which customers do not want to be concerned with the specifics of QoS configuration. These customers would prefer to enable QoS in the LAN or WAN by using one or two commands and to allow the Cisco IOS router or switch to automate the required complex QoS configuration. For these customers, Cisco has developed Cisco AutoQoS.

Classification

After network traffic is classified, individual packets are colored or marked so that other network devices can apply QoS features uniformly to those packets in compliance with the defined QoS policy. Marking the network traffic allows you to set or modify the attributes for traffic belonging to a specific class. When used in conjunction with network traffic classification, marking the network traffic is the foundation for enabling many quality of service (QoS) features on your network.

Marking

After network traffic is classified, individual packets are colored or marked so that other network devices can apply QoS features uniformly to those packets in compliance with the defined QoS policy. Marking the network traffic allows you to set or modify the attributes for traffic belonging to a specific class. When used in conjunction with network traffic classification, marking the network traffic is the foundation for enabling many quality of service (QoS) features on your network.