Network Management Time Travel
Rewinding and Replaying Your Network for Superior Troubleshooting
By Packet Design
Published 2008, Posted January 2008

Abstract:

Enterprise IT and service providers who run large, complex IP networks are under pressure to deliver increased application and service performance across their network infrastructures. Yet engineers know full well that simply locating the part of the network that handled the problem traffic is very difficult, often impossible. Without such basic visibility, troubleshooting the network’s part in application and service problems is no more than educated guesswork. More times than not, engineers are reduced to asking end customers to "call back when the problem occurs again." because they have no forensics to understand the network’s behavior at the time - an hour, day, or week ago - when the problem occurred.

Today that educated guesswork can be considered a thing of the past. Route analytics technology combined with a small footprint of collected Netflow data can provide application and service traffic visibility not only to every link in the network, but to the network-wide context of each link’s traffic, giving network managers a better handle on network issues. Furthermore, route analytics technology has the unique ability to let network managers "rewind" a network-wide recorded model of actual routing and traffic so that engineers can troubleshoot problems as if they were seeing them in real time.