Harnessing the Intelligence Within IP Networks

Network-Wide IP Routing and Traffic Analysis

IP has replaced circuit-based technologies as the de facto standard for mission-critical networks in both enterprises and service providers. In moving to IP, organizations have benefited from its inherent resiliency, scalability and lower deployment costs. But in the process they have also lost a degree of control. In circuit-switched environments network managers always knew exactly what paths, or routes, their network traffic would take – because they set up those fixed paths themselves. Now they are faced with a different kind of network entity – one in which routes are not fixed but constantly changing. The array of traditional tools developed to manage individual network devices (layer 2 management) provides no information about this dynamic routing infrastructure (layer 3). To gain any visibility into the so-called IP "cloud," operators until now have had to tediously query individual routers and manually correlate the resulting data, a process taking hours or even days.

Packet Design has pioneered a new network management technology based on the fusion of routing and traffic flow analysis that provides full visibility into the real-time, network-wide, integrated operation of IP routing and traffic flows. Route-flow fusion builds on Packet Design's previous pioneering work in the technology called IP Route Analytics, which provides full visibility into the routing operation of an IP network by "listening" to the various routing protocols (e.g., OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, EIGRP) and analyzing the information to build a real-time, network-wide routing map. Route-flow fusion adds the ability to see network-wide traffic flows without the burden of instrumenting the whole network with flow collectors, by utilizing a few collectors at key traffic insertion points on the network and utilizing Route Analytics-derived topology intelligence to concatenate flows by routable network prefixes and project those prefix-based aggregated flows across all links in the network using destination-based routing information operating on the destination prefixes of the aggregated flows. The result is an unprecedented level of visibility into the actual operation of control and data planes of an IP network, and an as-running model of the network that can be interacted with in real-time or historical play-back modes to execute accurate and timely monitoring, planning, and root-cause analysis troubleshooting. Route-flow fusion gives network engineers a top-down view of their networks, empowering a new level of confidence, accuracy and responsiveness to customer and network requirements.

To learn more about how IP Route Analytics operates and its benefits, please download our free white paper “IP Route Analytics – A New Foundation for Modern Network Operations”.

To learn more about how Route-flow fusion works and its benefits, please read our free white paper "Network-Wide IP Routing and Traffic Analysis - An Introduction to Traffic Explorer ".

Partial glossary of IP Route Analytics Terms

© 2008. Packet Design Inc.