Integrated Traffic and Routing Monitoring

Traffic Explorer’s topology-based approach goes beyond traditional traffic analysis tools, helping engineers to quickly diagnose network problems and perform sophisticated root cause analysis. Since Traffic Explorer knows the actual routed path through the network for every flow, operators can quickly focus their attention on suspect devices or links, rapidly pinpointing the cause of poorly performing applications or services. Traffic Explorer also shows the impact of routing changes or failures, as they happen, on network-wide traffic, highlighting traffic shifts that often result in network hot spots and impact application performance.

Traffic and routing events are correlated for faster root cause analysis

Existing traffic analysis tools, for example, can detect sudden increases in link utilization (only on monitored links!), but are unable to determine whether the increase is due to new traffic loads on the network, or the impact of a routing change somewhere else in the network that re-routed traffic over that link. Traffic Explorer not only answers this question for any link, but also shows the impact of every routing change on network-wide traffic, including total traffic volume and the number of flows and hops affected. This information helps operators prioritize their response to those situations with the greatest impact on services. Traffic Explorer can even send alerts whenever routing changes impact specific application or CoS traffic beyond user specified thresholds, letting engineers know immediately what happened, where it happened and what traffic was affected. To further reduce Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR), Traffic Explorer provides intuitive visualization tools that let engineers replay historical events and view animations showing how individual routing changes impacted traffic flows across the entire network. No other traffic analysis tool comes close.