Route Analytics (by Alex Henthorn-Iwane)

Author Profile - Alex Henthorn-Iwane is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Packet Design, joining the company in September 2004 and bringing 18 years of systems engineering, product management and marketing experience in network infrastructure, management and security technologies and products. Prior to Packet Design, Alex was Senior Director of Product Management and Product Marketing at CoSine Communications, a maker of virtualized edge routing and security infrastructure equipment for the Service Provider market. Previously, he was Director of Product Management and Marketing at Corona Networks, Lucent Technologies and Livingston Enterprises (acquired by Lucent); and held systems engineering management posts with Fibronics America. Alex holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley.

ROUTE ANALYTICS:

A NEW FOUNDATION FOR MODERN NETWORK OPERATIONS

The demands on large IP networks for performance and reliability have never been greater. But while the Internet Protocol's resiliency, scalability and economics have made it today's communication infrastructure of choice, IP's dynamic routing design presents formidable management challenges for organizations trying to guarantee service levels, whether to enterprise users or service provider customers. Old brute-force solutions such as indiscriminately adding bandwidth are no longer acceptable. Network operators and engineers need a new level of network visibility that will help them analyze – and exert greater control over – their network operations.

A technology known as route analytics offers unprecedented visibility into the dynamic operation of IP routing and traffic. Route analytics leverages the intelligence in routing protocols to automatically build and maintain an always-accurate routing map of any IP network, across AS, areas, multiple protocols, and even MPLS VPNs. Route analytics solutions peer with key routers in each AS or area, passively listening to and recording every routing update communicated throughout the network, then using the same algorithms that run on routers to calculate and deliver a routing topology map as accurate as the network’s actual routers understand it. Based on this routing map, route analytics then intelligently integrates Netflow data collected from a small subset of network interfaces to create an integrated, dynamically updated routing and traffic map.

This integrated view is distinct from traditional methods of Netflow analysis, which can only present link-by-link flow data in separate tabular reports. Route analytics collects Netflow records from routers handling the majority of traffic flows into a network, such as at data centers, Internet peerings and key WAN links. It then utilizes its always accurate knowledge of routing paths to map each traffic flow across the precise links it traverses in the actual network. The result is a network-wide map of all links with accurate real-time and historical traffic utilization that can be analyzed by CoS, VPN customer, BGP attributes, custom traffic classes, and granular traffic flow details.

Route analytics visibility complements existing SNMP management systems that focus on device and interface statistics and problems, by providing a network-wide understanding of the logical operation of IP networks across multiple devices and interfaces. This visibility greatly increases the accuracy and efficiency of key engineering and operations processes.

Real-Time Monitoring: Since route analytics utilizes routing protocol messages to continuously update its routing map, it can provide monitoring at the speed of the network. Unlike SNMP polling that may take several minutes to notice an issue, routing protocols communicate changes within milliseconds, allowing network operations to be alerted almost immediately to critical problems in the network, such as changes or losses of critical paths or links in the network.

Faster Troubleshooting: Route analytics records every routing and traffic change in the network, and provides a rewindable forensic history that greatly speeds troubleshooting. Today, many problems go unsolved due to a lack of historical information on network conditions, and the inability to localize the portion of the network that was delivering the problematic application or service traffic. As more problems go unsolved with their root causes still lurking in the network, both customer satisfaction and overall network quality tend to decline. With route analytics, engineers can move the network “back in time” and see exactly which path the traffic took through the network, if there was any congestion on any component links or CoS, or any routing issues—at the time the problem was occurring. This forensic history enables network operations to be more responsive to customers and to ultimately solve more problems, thereby preventing costly future application or service impacts.

Strengthened Change Management: One of the chief causes of application and service delivery problems is due to errors made in routine network changes. This is because change management processes are “input-oriented”, that is to say that they focus on things like using the correct command syntax, version of OS, etc. when making a change. However, engineers making these changes have no way to know what the effect of a planned change will be, nor whether the network as a whole is working as desired after a change is made. Since its understanding of the network is based on routing algorithms that can easily recalculate how the network would behave in the case of a change, route analytics offers network modeling and simulations that greatly strengthen change management processes. Engineers can model planned routing and traffic changes before making them to verify that the effect will be as desired, then use route analytics’ real-time view to validate the effect of changes after they’re made. By combining sound input-oriented change management controls with route analytics’ network-wide modeling and real-time visibility, engineers can prevent costly outages and slowdowns by drastically reducing change management errors.

Broad and Deep Capacity Planning: Using its collected history of routing and traffic operations, route analytics can easily perform highly accurate, network-wide capacity planning and trending analyses. Going far beyond simple link statistics, route analytics also provides insight into not only “how much” utilization will increase, but why utilization is increasing in certain portions of the network, by providing in-depth analyses of traffic by CoS, MPLS VPNs, Internet BGP routing attributes, and custom traffic classifications. Route analytics’ automation of information collection and deep analytical visibility into traffic allows network planners to make more intelligent planning choices and to more easily justify their capital expenditure requests.

Superior Network Continuity: Route analytics provides engineering teams with comprehensive routing health audits that identify issues in the network that usually go undetected until they cause a problem, such as:

• Asymmetric routes and ECMPs
• Routing reachability problems
• Vulnerable points in the routing topology where a link failure will have an outsized effect on routing metrics or reachability
• Unused links, which may indicate failed redundancy or simply wasted resources

Route analytics is primarily useful for complex routed IP networks where there are multiple paths between various points in the network, or multiple BGP peerings to manage. Route analytics also doesn’t stand on its own, and complements SNMP device management and end to end application or service performance measurement techniques. Route analytics provides powerful insight into the way IP networks are operating on a network-wide and edge to edge basis, and can provide significant boosts in operations and engineering accuracy and efficiency, ultimately reducing costly downtime.

The following is an unabridged version of this white paper.

For more information on route analytics, please visit our website or send questions to the author, alex (at) packetdesign (dot) com.