Types of policy actions

The policy actions are broadly classified in the following categories:

  • Remark actions

  • Police actions

  • Other actions

Each policy entry can have a combination of policy actions from these multiple categories, which are executed in the order of configuration.

Remark actions

This category contains the following actions:

  • Priority Code Point (PCP): 3-bit field in layer 2 802.1Q header refers to a class of service and maps to a frame priority level.

  • IP precedence: 3-bit field in IP header which denotes the importance or priority of the datagram.

  • IP Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP): 6-bit field in IP header for packet classification.

Police actions

Traffic policing meters inbound on an interface based on permitted bandwidth limits. Based on the metering, each packet is marked one of the three colors: red, yellow, or green.

Traffic is marked based on the following traffic parameters:

  • Committed information rate (CIR): Bandwidth limit for guaranteed traffic.

  • Committed burst size (CBS): Maximum packet size permitted for bursts of data that exceed the CIR.

Based on these parameters, each packet is marked as red, yellow, or green:

  • Green: Packet conforms to the bandwidth limit and the burst size of guaranteed traffic (CIR or CBS).

  • Yellow: Traffic that exceeds the bandwidth limit (CIR) but not to the burst size for guaranteed traffic (CBS).

  • Red: Traffic that exceeds the bandwidth limit (CIR) and the burst size for guaranteed traffic (CBS).

Packets marked green and yellow are in different packet queues with green having higher priority than yellow. Packets marked red are dropped. For details, see the Quality of Service Guide for your switch and software version.
NOTE:

The show policy hitcounts <POLICY-NAME> command displays the number of accepted bytes/conformed bytes (green and yellow bytes) as 0 kbps because of the type of switch chipset.

Other actions

Other actions include Drop: Drop the packet, and Mirror: Mirror the packets to a specified mirroring session. For details, see the Aruba 84xx Switch Series ArubaOS-CX Monitoring Guide.