Customer Benefits from the Route Explorer System:• Reduced difficult Stuck-in-Active routing troubleshooting

time from “days to minutes” in a 50,000 node, global IPnetwork with hundreds of Cisco EIGRP routers.

• Increased accuracy and prevented errors in networkplanning, resulting in higher network availability

• Alerted network engineers to logical network errors thatgo undetected by traditional SNMP device management

• Interfaced easily with existing management solutions• Future-proofed solution supports all major routing

protocols, including EIGRP, OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP

Proven, Market Leading Solutions: Packet Design is the pioneer and market leader in routing-aware network management solutions. Find out more at www.packetdesign.com

Customer Case Study

How Route Explorer Works:Route Explorer discovers all EIGRP routers on the network and creates an end-to-end view of the Layer 3 topology. It then "listens" to the EIGRP protocol exchanges to learn when changes in routing distances occur. As a distance-vector protocol, EIGRP provides only partial information about the Layer 3 topology. Route Explorer analyzes the distance changes to infer their most likely source, and then validates the inference, without placing any significant load on the network infrastructure. Route Explorer also provides a list of all the routers on the network, along with model numbers and Cisco IOS versions, providing a valuable, up-to-the-minute description of network assets.

"There has been no quick way to track down the source of an SIA problem – the router that kicks off the whole chain reaction," the company’s network architect said. "We would have to start at the router where the SIA last occurred, go to its nearest neighbor, and follow the problem router by router back to its source. All the while we would be hoping the SIA was still occurring, because otherwise it was like tracing footprints in the sand, where all of a sudden there were no 'tracks' to follow."In a very large enterprise network, this process could take days – with dire results. "If an SIA affected a high-volume pharmaceutical manufacturing site, a WAN going down for a day could have huge cost consequences," he said. "Even SIA enhancements released by Cisco offer no fast, efficient way to identify the source of the problem."In one case, Route Explorer took only five minutes to track an SIA problem to one of the company's RAS [remote access server] routers that connected dial-up users to the corporate network. "RAS users are very dynamic, and each user logging in or out established an EIGRP route and triggered an SIA," the network architect recalled. The problem could be addressed using route summarization, which allows a RAS router to advertise a single route for multiple users rather than separate routes for each user. But configuring route summarization must be done on each individual RAS router, which becomes impractical with a huge network where routers are spread across continents and configurations are frequently modified. Route Explorer makes it fast and easy to find those RAS routers that are not properly configured, removing a major source of recurring SIA problems, and.supports any size IP network, no matter how large or highly subdivided into separate areas.

Reducing MTTR for EIGRP Stuck-In-Active Errors:A common issue in EIGRP networks, the "stuck in active" problem occurs when an EIGRP router fails to receive a reply to a routing-path query from one or more of its "neighbor" routers within an allotted time. This causes EIGRP to drop neighbor adjacencies, which can impact service to users; the problem can cascade through the network until large numbers of users are affected and network outages occur.

Major Pharmaceuticals Company Enhances Management of Cisco EIGRP Network with the Route Explorer™ System

Proven, Market Leading Solutions: Based in Santa Clara, Packet Design is the pioneer and market leader in routing-aware network management solutions. Find out more at www.packetdesign.com

Pharmaceuticals EIGRP Case Study (Continued)

Reducing MTTR for EIGRP Stuck-In-Active Errors (continued from page 1)On another occasion, a network engineer at one of the company's European offices had spent three days trying to locate the source of an SIA. Having heard that Route Explorer was installed at the U.S. headquarters, he phoned for help with the problem. The network operations team at headquarters used Route Explorer to find the culprit router remotely within five minutes.An SIA problem can be tracked down even if it is intermittent, thanks to Route Explorer's ability to record all EIGRP routing events to its database, creating an event log that users can rewind and play back to show the end-to-end network view at any time in the past. "Route Explorer would just record it all, so we could go back and look for the problem at our leisure," said the network architect. "No more disappearing footprints in the sand."

Using Scenario Planning to More Accurately Plan Routing Behavior Network-Wide:Route Explorer's "what if" scenario planning functionality has helped the pharmaceutical company address another challenge: adjusting EIGRP default settings to correct suboptimal routing and reduce the frequent trouble tickets that resulted. EIGRP calculates routes using an algorithm that incorpo-rates link bandwidth and delay parameters, which are preset based on the interface capacity and type. But the preset delay values often were not appropriate for the company's worldwide network topology. Using the default values would sometimes lead to situations such as route paths unnecessarily traversing several extra hops, the occurrence of asymmetric routes, or other unpredictable network behavior. The network team wanted to come up with delay values that would create more deterministic routing in their network. But, without visibility into the routing, they had no way of knowing the impact that different values would have."We used Route Explorer's what-if analysis to come up with values that worked, simulating them on one network area at a time," the architect said. "Without this ability to do pre-production testing, we would have had to throw new delay values right into the production environment and take our chances. This use of Route Explorer alone will pay for the device tenfold."

Routing Events Signaled Through HP OpenView Console for More Accurate Fault Management:The company's main network management platform is the widely-used HP OpenView, so the network operations team liked having the ability to set Route Explorer traps and alerts that would appear on their OpenView consoles. In fact, Route Explorer was designed with the idea of its being tightly coupled – and sharing data – with traditional network management platforms such as OpenView."Some time ago, during a link failure at one of our larger locations, HP OpenView polling reported the status of all router interfaces as being 'up,'" the network architect said. "It turned out that we had unwittingly been rerouting over international links! Now we use Route Explorer's 'watch list' function to signal us about any changes on this and other key high-bandwidth routes, through alerts that show up on the OpenView alarm browser."

Deployed in the world’s largest IP networks Dozens of the world’s largest enterprises, service providers, government and military agencies and educational institutions use Route Explorer to manage their networks.

Future-Proof, Broad Routing Protocol SupportWhile the company is currently using Route Explorer's EIGRP capability, the product also supports the BGP, OSPF and IS-IS protocols. In the future, the team may activate the BGP functionality, to monitor and manage the routes between major corpo-rate sites. They also may deploy additional units at some regional offices, to gain Layer 3 visibility for other regional operations centers.