VPN Traffic Explorer delivers the industry’s most comprehensive Layer 3 MPLS VPN service management solution, helping service providers rapidly resolve service issues, proactively plan for growth, accurately model changes to their network, and identify revenue opportunities and key business trends. VPN Traffic Explorer leverages Packet Design’s industry leading route analytics technology to provide unprecedented visibility across the service provider’s entire network, including the ability to view individual customer VPN topologies, monitor reachability and traffic loads between all sites, and analyze traffic flows by customer and Class of Service (CoS) on every link in their network.
Network-Wide MPLS VPN Traffic Visibility
Given the importance of Layer 3 MPLS VPN services as well as the size and complexity of their underlying networks, Service Providers need global visibility into the routing and traffic dynamics across the entire network in order to effectively respond to dynamically changing conditions and customer requirements. Yet, while many MPLS VPN traffic analysis tools promise global visibility, they are based on traditional network management approaches that fall far short of meeting this need by offering data only on Provider Edge (PE) router to Customer Edge (CE) router interfaces, with no visibility into core network dynamics or comprehensive views into individual customer VPNs. Even with these limitations, traditional network management methods exact a heavy toll on the network and operational budgets in terms of required traffic flow collection or deployed hardware probes .
VPN Traffic Explorer uniquely combines Packet Design’s patent-pending route analytics technology, Netflow/IPFIX traffic flow analysis, and MPLS control plane protocol awareness to deliver an integrated view of the entire network’s VPN routing and traffic dynamics with minimal network overhead, allowing engineers for the first time to answer critical questions such as:
- Which routers and links are (or were) carrying a specific VPN customer’s traffic?
- Are all the sites of a customer’s VPN connected and reachable to each other through the VPN network?
- What is the breakdown of traffic by Class of Service (CoS) on any given link in the network?
- What is the growth trend for a VPN customer?
- If current VPN traffic growth continues, will the current QoS configurations in the network still be valid in the future or will network changes or capacity upgrades be needed?
- Will adding a new customer impact meeting existing customer SLAs?
Without VPN Traffic Explorer’s network-wide understanding of MPLS VPNs, network managers are left to guess at root causes of customer issues, how to sufficiently plan for customer growth, and how to prevent configuration mistakes.
Network-Wide MPLS VPN Traffic Monitoring and Analysis
VPN Traffic Explorer provides unprecedented visibility, monitoring and analysis of MPLS VPN traffic on a per customer and network-wide basis. By mapping customer traffic flows across their individual VPN topology, VPN Traffic Explorer uniquely delivers traffic visibility throughout the provider’s network – from the PE router where customer traffic enters the network, through the routers and links in the MPLS core that forward that traffic, to the PE router connected to the customer’s destination site.
Traffic on every link in the network can be monitored and analyzed, either in aggregate across all customers or by individual customer. Service providers can view individual customer VPN topologies, visualize the complete end-to-end path between any two sites, and analyze a customer’s site-to-site service by prefix reachability, traffic utilization and CoS breakdown on all links connecting those sites. Engineers can utilize powerful traffic analysis tools to speed troubleshooting, including:
- Rewindable network-wide history: The entire network’s traffic and routing history can be rewound to the most relevant starting point—the time when the problem actually occurred, so that engineers can troubleshoot the problem as if it were occurring in real-time
- Time-range comparison reports: Once the problem occurrence is localized in the network history, engineers can easily compare current traffic statistics with a previous timeframe to identify anomalies
- Flexible, any-to-any drill down traffic reports: Engineers can recursively run drill-down reports on traffic volumes from different perspectives, leading to faster root-cause isolation. Drill down reports display traffic volumes by:
- Links
- VPN customers
- Class of Service
- P routers
- Ingress or Egress PE routers
- Flows
With a complete, detailed view of each customer’s VPN and the network-wide routing and traffic infrastructure supporting all customer VPNs, providers can ensure service delivery, increase customer satisfaction and avoid payouts due to service-level agreement violations.
The VPN Links Traffic report shows aggregate MPLS VPN traffic on all links in the network. Engineers can select a link and drill down to view the link’s traffic broken out by other criteria such as Customer, CoS, or detailed flows.
MPLS VPN Capacity Planning
VPN Traffic Explorer lets service providers ensure that their network will continue to meet growing customer needs by predicting future capacity requirements. Network engineers can analyze traffic trends on every link in the network, projecting not only future traffic levels, but easily determining when user-specified thresholds will be reached. Projections can be based on total link traffic, thereby anticipating and helping avoid network congestion, or by CoS, assuring that the network is properly engineered for critical traffic, such as voice or video. Traffic projections can be calculated using a variety of models (e.g. linear, exponential) to best fit historical trends. When capacity increases are required, network managers can justify upgrades since they’ll know which customers contributed to the growth.
MPLS VPN Network Modeling
VPN Traffic Explorer allows engineers to model network changes such as the growth of an individual customer or additions of new customer VPNs before they’re implemented, helping to ensure that service levels can be met in the core network once service changes are made. Routine maintenance changes and network reconfiguration can also be simulated in order to preventing outages from simple misconfigurations and even from network architecture errors that only become apparent when routing and traffic is altered. VPN Traffic Explorer can also simulate changes to an entire customer or the whole network’s traffic matrix, showing traffic volumes between every source/destination pair in the network. Before and after comparison reports allow for comprehensive and detailed analysis on all modeled changes. Since changes are simulated on an always up-to-date model of the network, engineers can be confident about the outcome of any planned maintenance operations or network upgrades.
Enhanced Business Intelligence
Beyond the value it provides to engineering and operations teams, VPN Traffic Explorer provides a rich source of business data for service creation, customer reporting and sales purposes through its understanding of individual and overall customer trends.
Detailed information on individual customer usage can be mined to determine site-to-site traffic volumes, break down traffic by CoS per site, and identify bandwidth-hogging applications and the most active users. Service providers can access this data via an XML API and deliver it to their key clients using their own customer portal or by creating customized email reports. With the ability to offer extensive VPN usage data to their top customers, service providers are able to provide additional value while differentiating their service.
VPN Traffic Explorer’s powerful reporting capabilities also help the service provider’s sales and marketing teams to identify key trends, such as which customers are growing fastest, who will need a service upgrade and when, how various service classes are trending and which customers are using them. This knowledge can be used to up-sell individual customers, create new service bundles or tailor existing service offerings to gain competitive advantage and increase revenue.
How VPN Traffic Explorer Works
VPN Traffic Explorer efficiently collects Netflow v9 and MPLS Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) information from the perimeter of core P routers via distributed Flow Recorder appliances, allowing for minimal hardware deployment and management traffic overhead.
Flow Analyzer and Modeling Engine appliances synthesize Netflow data from Flow Recorders and route analytics intelligence from VPN Explorer to provide network-wide and VPN-specific routing and traffic visualization, monitoring, alerting, analysis and network modeling.
Datasheet