Solutions
The Solution – Iptivia’s Unique Approach
Iptivia RouteDynamics™ uniquely addresses these challenges by enabling service providers and enterprises to manage a systematic process:
Step 1: Monitor control plane and compute paths.
In order to automatically recover from equipment or connection failures, routers (the devices that control how traffic is sent through the network) continuously update each other about the state of the network. RouteDynamics taps into this information (a.k.a. the routing control plane) to efficiently build a complete model of the network topology without introducing any of the overhead associated with typical polling based solutions.
Using the control plane information, RouteDynamics calculates the path of any service (unicast or multicast) across the network, employing the same algorithms the routers themselves use. By maintaining a history of topology changes, RouteDynamics also shows how a service path changed over time. At this level, RouteDynamics provides a powerful tool for diagnosing service problems.
Step 2: Monitor—and proactively alarm on—persistent service paths.
By supporting persistent service paths, RouteDynamics goes beyond point-in-time path calculation to continuously monitor how each critical service flows through the network, generating proactive notifications within seconds of a service disruption or deviation from its intended baseline.
Users can then bring up a graphical display of the current service path state to see where it might be broken or diverge from its intended baseline. In this way, IT staff always know how a given service is flowing through the network. Because of its ability to constantly track all network events that trigger changes in network behavior, RouteDynamics is also able to immediately identify the root cause of any changes, whether they result from network failures or configuration changes. This allows IT staff to quickly formulate a course of action to restore services to their original state.
Since RouteDynamics monitors network routing conditions in real time, it picks up short duration (transient) conditions, such as route flapping, in addition to long-term outages. Transient disruptions often wreak havoc with real time applications but typically go undetected by traditional network management tools. In this way, RouteDynamics proactively alerts the operations group about service impacting network problems.
Step 3: Track key performance indicators (KPIs).
In addition to correlating individual service impacting network events, RouteDynamics also tracks and aggregates network and service instabilities over time to provide IT management with high level visibility into overall network service readiness, allowing them to identify points of weakness that require attention.
Step 4: Extend service path awareness to existing OSS tools.
RouteDynamics supports a robust set of APIs that allow IT organizations to add path awareness to their existing OSS tools. In addition to its proactive alarm generation capabilities, RouteDynamics also supports the ability to export path information to other OSS tools (e.g., fault, performance, configuration) using either a push or pull model. This enables RouteDynamics to export continuously updated path information and enable the consolidated presentation of performance data for entire service delivery paths and the integration of application and network change management processes.
RouteDynamics also supports a bi-directional launch in-context capability to streamline support activities when users are working with multiple network management tools. Users can traverse immediately from a VoIP service quality alarm to a view of the IP network path for that service to the health of the network devices and links in that path.
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