NPS Policy Engine Test

Every network policy must have at least one configured condition. NPS provides many conditions groups that allow you to clearly define the properties that the connection request received by NPS must have in order to match the policy. How quickly NPS matches requests with policies is a good measure of the efficiency of the NPS policy engine. Using the NPS Policy Engine test, administrators can measure just that! This test reports the time taken by NPS to process requests, the rate of pending requests on NPS, and the number of requests that matched configured policies. In the process, the test reveals processing bottlenecks on the NPS and how they impact policy matching.

Target of the test : An NPS server

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every NPS server that is being monitored

Configurable parameters for the test

Parameters	Description
Test period	This indicates how often should the test be executed.
Host	The host for which the test is to be configured.
Port	The port at which the NPS server listens. The default is NULL.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Last round-trip time	Indicates the interval (in hundredths of a second) between the most recent request to NPS and its response.	Secs	Ideally, the value of this measure should be very low. A high value indicates that NPS is taking too long to verify whether/not requests it receives match with the policy configuration.
Matched remote access policy	Indicates the average number of remote access policies that have been matched with requests per second.	Number
Pending requests	Indicates the rate of requests destined for NPS that have not yet timed out or received a response.	Reqs/Sec	A high value could either indicate a processing bottleneck on NPS or a high timeout setting (which could be causing many requests to be retransmitted to the NPS). In the case of the latter, you may want to consider modifying the timeout setting to minimize the number of pending requests.