Today’s networks are so dynamic that traditional methods for network monitoring are inadequate. Traditionally, we have tools that periodically poll devices or retrieve config files. However, these tools failed to take the pulse of the thousands of routing events that occur every hour in your network and their impact on critical service paths. Flow analyzers give holistic view about your network bandwidth and traffic patterns. However, it also lacks path information and cannot practically be instrumented across the entire network. Service management and APM tools display end-to-end response time metrics but offer little help in isolating the specific node or link within the network cloud that is responsible for out-of-baseline performance. As the industry moves to software-defined networking, these challenges are exacerbated and real-time telemetry and analytics become essential for network managers.

The advent of any-to-any networks, where application traffic can flow in any direction, led to an increase in the number of meshed networks and the use of dynamic IP routing. When traffic can take any path from source to destination with routing decisions being made on a hop-by-hop basis, network engineers lose visibility into the actual path that traffic takes. This makes it difficult to achieve objectives such as load balancing and end-to-end Quality of Service. Add to this dynamism transitory routing error conditions that cause frequent path changes, and service assurance becomes really difficult.

SNMP-based tools show the health and performance of network hardware, and NetFlow and other traffic flow analyzers show the volume and composition of traffic. But these traditional network management and monitoring solutions, along with ping, traceroute and other CLI commands, do not provide real-time, global visibility into dynamically changing routing behaviour and the paths that critical services take across the network. While there are tools that capture network topology snapshots, in dynamic networks this data can become stale quickly. And for some network applications, real-time information is critical. After all, milliseconds can equate to millions of dollars.

To solve this problem, Packet Design’s SDN-ready service assurance products integrate routing, traffic and performance telemetry to provide unique, path-aware analytics. IGP and BGP protocol messages are captured in real time so NOC engineers have always-current visibility into the network control plane. Service-centric traffic flow and SNMP performance metrics complete the picture.

Actionable alerts and intuitive triage workflows designed for Operations teams help to reduce MTTR, resulting in fewer sustained outages, improved service quality, and happier users. Troubleshooting routing issues are made be made quick and easy by playing back the routing events from the captured routing history, find the problematic link(s) and troubleshoot only those concerned routers and links.Customizable dashboards and reports allow network operators to be more proactive in managing service delivery, report on service availability and produce detailed post-mortem analyses when unavoidable outages do occur.