Route Explorer enables network operators and engineers to deliver a more predictable IP network infrastructure, by providing unprecedented visibility, troubleshooting and modeling of Layer 3 and routing dynamics in IP networks. Whether enhancing the efficiency of day to day network operations, reducing MTTR for complex routing problems, or preparing IP networks for new converged applications, Route Explorer provides a tangible return on investment by helping network engineering and operations departments meet stringent SLAs for network services, and increasing their responsiveness and productivity.

Enhanced IP Routing Operations and Management

Route Explorer provides network operators and engineers with the ability to understand and see, for the first time, the dynamic routing operation of their IP network, improving network availability and performance, while reducing operating costs. Route Explorer enables them to monitor their routed (layer-3) network in real-time, become aware of and pinpoint the root cause of problems sooner, analyze historical routing events to troubleshoot intermittent or past problems, and ensure that their network is operating as intended.

Below are some examples of common ways in which our customers use Route Explorer on a day-to-day basis to monitor, maintain, troubleshoot and analyze their IP networks. These brief animated examples provide annotated, step-by-step Route Explorer screen shots that walk you through using the product to resolve some typical networking challenges.

Monitoring and Alerting on Changes in Redundancy

Network redundancy is critical to service availability. Redundancy is achieved by connecting critical servers and workgroups to multiple routers. When a primary route fails, an alternative, redundant route takes over to provide connectivity. But how do you know when a route has failed or when only one path to a destination remains? The best way to look for impaired redundancy is at the IP layer. The routing protocols provide the fastest and most accurate reflection of connectivity in the network. This application example shows how Route Explorer can help you monitor the redundancy in your network. View Flash Demo

Detecting and Alerting on Flapping Routes

Flapping routes are bad for network availability and bad for business. IP networks are generally very robust. If a link or router should fail, traffic would be rerouted automatically. But when a route repeatedly goes up and down (“flaps”), traffic will be rerouted continuously. Network and application performance may be impacted, leading to lost productivity and customer dissatisfaction. While SNMP-based device managers might detect flapping routes, their polling cycle may result in detection of the flap after it has been occurring for some time, or the flap could go completely unnoticed. Detecting flaps at the IP layer is the most timely and accurate method. This application example shows how Route Explorer can alert you to flapping routes as soon as they happen. View Flash Demo

Verifying Proper Network Operation After Maintenance Activities

Routine maintenance is a fundamental part of keeping your network running smoothly. But maintenance activities can make the network susceptible to the introduction of configuration errors. A conservative estimate by Yankee Group puts misconfiguration-induced network outages at 30% of all network problems. Manual verification of proper network operation after a maintenance window is equally prone to human error, and waiting for trouble tickets to highlight configuration errors is not good operating practice. This application example shows how Route Explorer can provide the quickest and most effective way to ensure that your network is back up and running as intended after a maintenance window.

VoIP Network Readiness

Route Explorer helps network engineers ensure that their IP networks are ready and will remain steady for VoIP roll-outs, by reducing one of the chief causes of VoIP quality and availability problems--network and routing instability. Route Explorer complements VoIP service management tools by providing real-time, network-wide insight into VoIP-affecting Layer 3 dynamics in the underlying IP network:

Route and Link Flapping

According to studies conducted in carrier-class networks that are engineered for toll-quality VoIP delivery, the number one cause of VoIP quality degradation was link failures and resulting routing problems such as route flapping. Unstable, flapping links can be even more disruptive since they cause constant rerouting of packets. Link and route flapping cause disruptive levels of latency, as well as dropped packets. Route Explorer provides real-time monitoring and alerting on link and route flapping, as well as preserves a completely accurate historical record of routing events in the network, enabling faster troubleshooting and root cause analysis, as well as proactive

Call Path Tracing

One of the key steps in troubleshooting VoIP problems is to understand the precise path that the troubled calls took across the network when the problem occurred. Before Route Explorer, there was no practical and reliable way to perform this analysis, since the state of routing could have changed since the problem was seen. Route Explorer can accurately identifying routes between identified IP addresses through the network at any point in time, aiding problem resolution.

Route Optimization

Route Explorer enables network engineers to examine their entire network to ensure that routing is stable and optimized for VoIP delivery, across protocols (OSPF, EIGRP, IS-IS, BGP and MPLS VPNs), areas and Autonomous Systems. By proactively monitoring and analyzing the state of routing, network engineers can see problems as they emerge in the routing plane, before they affect the forwarding plane. Route Explorer also provides sophisticated modeling of failure scenarios and routing metric changes on the as-running routed topology, allowing network engineers to ensure that there is sufficient redundancy and optimal routing.

Internet and Inter-Domain Analysis and Troubleshooting

Route Explorer's BGP Root Cause Analysis capability provides network managers a way to identify and diagnose complex BGP issues affecting mission-critical Internet or inter-domain connectivity. BGP Root Cause Analysis provides macro-level visibility and automated analysis of the causal events that can trigger millions of BGP routing updates, significantly decreasing mean time to repair (MTTR) and increasing service uptime. One of the tools available within the BGP Root Cause feature is a Root Cause Animation feature, that shows a dynamic topology visualization of the macro-level dynamics that are indicated by the raw BGP event stream. Upon selecting an event timeline of interest and launching the animation tool, the user can play, slow-down, fast-forward, and rewind the animation to view how the multi-domain peering structures and routes changed over time. A multi-domain map and graphic representation of route volume per router peering provides insight into how external peers and next-hop peers have affected IBGP peers and overall routing behavior. Isolation of root-cause events such as peering flaps, MED (Multi Exist Discriminator) oscillations, misconfigured community tags and unwanted back-door paths is performed in minutes rather than days.

The animations can be saved in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format, a W3C standard for producing high quality graphics. Adobe has a free SVG browser plugin available for download. Download Adobe SVG plugin .

Below is a brief guide to the graphic representation of the network in the BGP Root Cause Analysis animation:

• The thickness of a peering indicates how many prefixes are routed over that peering, rather than how much traffic is flowing.
• Link colors indicate how the routes are changing:
  • Black means the routes are not changing
  • Blue means the peering is losing prefixes
  • Green means the peering is gaining prefixes
  • Yellow means the prefix count is flapping too fast to animate
  • A peering that has lost prefixes also has a gray shadow that indicates the largest number of prefixes it ever carried.
• The Route Explorer is shown as a rectangle on the left. It (passively) peers with all the site's BGP edge routers (or core route reflectors if used), exactly as an interior router would iBGP peer with them. (I.e., the recorder's view of the BGP information is exactly the same one seen by all members of the site's iBGP mesh.)

How to use the SVG animation:

At the bottom left of the window is the animation clock (what point in the timeline of the event is currently being shown). Below it is a large "Start/Pause" button (click it once to start the animation and again to pause). Below that are buttons that take you to the beginning or end of the animation. To the right of the Start button are animation speed controls: the center square selects "normal" speed (a value built into the animation at the time it was created). Each click on the upper triangle will double the current speed and each click on the lower will halve it. Below the speed controls is a button that toggles between one-shot and continuous loop playback mode. The plot to the right of the controls shows how the prefixes varied with time on whichever link is selected in the topology graph (most animations have an "interesting" link selected at startup but click on any link to select it). Click on any point in this graph to take you to that time in the animation. To the right of the plot is various information about the currently selected edge.

Detecting BGP Failover and Slow Convergence from High Volume BGP Updates

BGP issues can generate an overwhelming number of routing updates, that are beyond human ability to analyze effectively in a timely manner. This application example shows how Route Explorer can greatly simplify the root cause diagnosis of a large volume of BGP routing updates, resulting in more rapid response to critical errors or more proactive network optimization. The example shows an animation of the U.C. Berkeley network's BGP routing, when a 500,000 event incident occurred. During this incident, 30,000 prefixes failed over twice from CalrenN-Qwest to Level-3 via a sub-optimal 6 AS-hop backup path. Convergence time was very long--twenty minutes for each of the fail-overs, and one minute for the fail-backs. Without Route Explorer, it could take hours of analysis to determine what happened.

Diagnosing BGP MED Oscillations

Floods of BGP updates caused by random routing behavior such as Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) oscillations, can create an operationally disruptive level of BGP routing traffic, impairing even a large network. This application example shows how Route Explorer can diagnose a huge volume of BGP updates generated due to an actual MED oscillation at a Tier 1 ISP. The animation utilizes anonymized network numbering, and shows four core route reflectors--two in each of two PoPs. Both pairs of route reflectors, Core1-a/b and Core2-a/b, each have paths to 4.5/16 via AS2. Core1-a/b also have a path via AS1. The ISP is accepting MEDs from AS2 and Core1 has the better MED. Core2-a/b announce superior metrics then withdraw their AS2 route randomly and rapidly, on the average of every 10 microseconds (100,000 times per second each--the links are colored yellow since the event rate is too fast to animate. This flood causes Core1-a and Core1-b to randomly switch paths on the average every 10 milliseconds (100 times/second), a rate so rapid that it shows as blue flashes that occasionally happen during the animation which indicate that the instantaneous announce / withdraw cycles are happening in less than a millisecond. The animation shows 10 seconds of this issue, with a time scale in milliseconds. The actual event lasted for at five days, continuously, and accounted for 95% of the ISP's BGP traffic. In other words, this one prefix generated 20 times more iBGP traffic than all the rest of the Internet combined, making diagnosis extremely difficult. With Route Explorer's Root Cause Analysis capability, diagnosis and problem resolution can be effected within minutes of recording and analyzing the BGP routing updates.