A number of Internet powerhouses, such as Google and Alta Vista, have now deployed IPv6 accessible websites. Operating systems, such as the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, include IPv6 support.

IPv6 will become the essential backbone protocol for next-generation networking. IPv6 boasts improved network reliability, lower costs and improved security in addition to its vastly expanded addressing and routing capabilities (achieved by increasing the address length from 32 to 128 bits). While the benefits of IPv6 are apparent, performance management will becomes inherently more difficult as a single IPv6 subnet is as large as the entire Internet today.

As with IPv4, IPv6 quality of service is implemented at Layer 2 and Layer 3 of the TCP/IP stack. A number of network management vendors support IPv6, but while passive network management tools may comply with the new version, some may not include the evolving set of features for IPv6 support. Alone, passive monitoring may be unable to properly detect performance issues experienced by the end user, and for web-enabled businesses, the end user experience is the most critical element of service quality.

For business and organizations deploying IPv6 websites, performance management and service-level agreement monitoring become more complicated due to the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6, the exponential size of IPv6 addressing and routing, and the lack of a killer application to drive wide-scale and accelerated deployment.

IPV6 and IPv4 headers are not interoperable. IPv4 is a best-effort service where all packets are treated equally; IPv6 implements quality-of-service (QOS) by classifying IP packets using an 8-bit traffic class field and a 20-bit flow label field in the header. While IPv6 web sites can be accessed using dual stacks, tunneling and protocol translation, native IPv6 performance monitoring is essential to determine whether performance issues are originating in the end-to-end IPv6 environment. Companies that have deployed IPv6 websites must utilize native IPv6 performance monitoring to isolate service-level agreement (SLA) issues for these sites as IPv4 monitoring alone will not help isolate IPv6 QoS issues.

There are several reasons to actively monitor IPv6 websites in a native environment:

• Because there's a gap between IPv6 capabilities and current network management tools, active monitoring is essential.
• As with any new technology, there is the potential for flaws, which may impact uptime and performance.
• Pv6 will lead to larger networks that directly address more network devices, increasing the overall complexity.
• IPv6 end-to-end security features, while improving security, will make it harder to analyze network traffic.