Are you missing a major opportunity to take your network operations to the next level?
Modern IP MPLS networks are highly dynamic, which is great news in terms of handling incidents and keeping your customer-facing services online. Unfortunately, though, being ‘dynamic’ also means rapid routing changes, which create a raft of challenges when it comes to troubleshooting, fault-fixing, and even planning for new service deployments.
Jürgen Hatheier, CTO EMEA at Ciena, explains how many service providers are constrained by unconnected monitoring systems and manual processes to correlate on network, traffic, and routing performance. And why this could be a major missed opportunity to speed up troubleshooting and fault fixing, while also optimizing resource utilization, route performance, and new service planning.
There is a solution available today that can provide real-time and historical visibility into network-wide routing paths and traffic behavior. It can also correlate routing events with latency and performance metrics. Leveraging this type of correlated real-time and historical visibility into service paths, traffic behavior and network performance, you can:
- Understand how traffic traverses the entire network,
- See how network performance and service delivery is affected by network routing behavior, and
- Optimize the network with unprecedented accuracy and speed.
Without these insights, you could be missing out on some major assurance and delivery opportunities. These include:
- Operational opportunities - When a set of services are rerouted for whatever reason, it’s not just routing, traffic and performance that are affected. Services on the secondary or redundant route may also need to be rerouted as well, along with those on subsequent routes that are impacted. All of this creates a ripple effect that is difficult to understand and monitor, and a large number of links may become congested unexpectedly, negatively impacting customer-facing services.
Correlated routing, traffic and performance data can help you overcome these challenges. With real-time visibility of how rerouted services are impacting your network’s performance, you can make required changes quickly – leading to better utilization of assets and reduced CapEx, whilst ensuring that customer SLAs are maintained. This visibility also means you can resolve issues faster, while also reducing stress – for you, your team, and your network. - Network optimization opportunities - Without correlated data, links and infrastructure that are becoming saturated and impacting service quality for your customers may not be detected until customers complain. Equally, it may be hard to identify underutilized resources in other areas of the network that could be used to assure service performance and availability during peak times.
Identifying paths that are negatively impacting performance, either because paths have too many hops, or because they route outbound traffic on a different path to inbound traffic (asymmetric routing) may also be challenging.
By pinpointing the location and root cause of service degradation and then rerouting traffic to increase efficiency, performance, and resource utilization across your network these issues can be addressed. Providing this end to end view of service performance enables customer service levels to be maintained, reduces churn, and as existing resources are optimized, you can also realize significant CAPEX savings as no new resources need to be added. - New services modeling opportunities - With no way to correlate traffic and performance data with routing, it is difficult (or impossible) to accurately model the impact of new services on the network. Additionally, it can be extremely hard to model the impact of growing service demand over time, making it tough to plan network upgrades effectively.
With correlated traffic and performance data, you can simulate the impact of new services on all areas of the network before you deploy – minimizing the risk of performance degradation or breached customer SLAs. You can also overlay historic traffic data to understand your growth trajectory to inform your network evolution strategy – leading to a potential increase in top-line revenues and reduced risk in new-service rollout, including reduced time to market - Peering optimization opportunities - With a siloed view of routing, traffic and performance data, it might not be possible to understand if traffic is being routed to a destination Autonomous Systems (AS) cost effectively, or to react quickly to address outages and other events that are impacting the delivery of traffic to peering partners.
By bringing traffic and performance data together in real-time, you can get clear visibility of peering traffic flows, the performance of ingress and egress ports, and other infrastructure. That means you can pinpoint and address issues – such as congestion at the network edge – and you can ensure that your peering traffic is always routed to its final destination cost effectively and in line with customer and partner SLAs, lowering OpEx and increasing customer satisfaction.
Find out more
Blue Planet Route Optimization and Analysis (ROA) Explorer Suite allows you to correlate routing, performance and traffic data across your entire network for both real-time and historical analysis. In addition, ROA’s Traffic Explorer and Performance Explorer modules provide valuable data required for this correlation to give you a clear view of routing changes and network performance issues that are causing service degradation– all in a single pane view. As a result, ROA with TEX and PEX can significantly reduce the time and stress associated with troubleshooting, and help you assure service delivery, reduce customer churn, and keep your customers happy.
If you want to find out more about ROA’s Traffic Explorer and Performance Explorer modules, and how they can help you take your network troubleshooting, fault-fixing and planning to the next level, contact us today for a demo.
