Become a hero for your customers and colleagues: how to troubleshoot and fault-fix your network faster
When you experience major traffic congestion or an outage, your customers may start calling in about reachability issues and poor performance long before you are even aware of the issue. This is amplified by the dynamic nature of routing in IP/MPLS networks, which means faults may have even righted themselves before you find out why they occurred in the first place.
This kind of scenario can be very frustrating and stressful, as well as damaging to customer trust.
The better way to troubleshoot and fault-fix your network
The way to address these troubleshooting and fault-fixing challenges is to bring routing and traffic data together with performance data – all in a real-time, ‘single pane’ view. With this approach, you can quickly identify the root cause of performance degradation based on routing behavior, correlated with key performance indicators such as jitter and latency on a particular path. You can also monitor individual network components along a routing path to understand how their performance could be affecting service delivery. This approach means that you’ll know about any issues before the customer calls – resulting in faster time-to-resolution, increased customer satisfaction and potential NPS improvements
The better way to monitor and manage your peering
As well as speeding up troubleshooting and fault-fixing across your network, tools are available that allow you to assess performance on paths that extend out across the network edge to peering partner networks, either service provider peers or private peers. This is especially useful for determining, and troubleshooting, whether traffic spikes, congestion, or an outage are due to peering issues or a performance issue on your network.
With service performance tests along with monitoring of ingress and egress traffic, you can measure the performance between your network and external sites frequently and on an ongoing basis. This means you can immediately see if services that touch peering partner networks are running slowly or being interrupted; and react very quickly when issues arise - preempting potential issues and reducing customer calls.
Become a hero for your customers, and your business
With these insights you can finally move away from manual data correlation from stand-alone performance and traffic monitoring systems. This means you can dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to understand and react to events that cause degradation of service performance.
In other words, real-time, correlated traffic, performance and routing data makes you a hero for your customers. You’ll know about a problem before they do - resulting in faster troubleshooting and fault fixing and increased service availability and performance. At the same time, by applying accurate Route Cause Analysis (RCA) you can minimize the risk of downtime, reduce truck-rolls and disruptions, and non-compliance with customer-service SLAs – which means you’ll be a hero for your stakeholders and colleagues as well.
Find out more
Ciena provides all of these capabilities with our Blue Planet Route Optimization and Analysis (ROA) Explorer Suite, which includes our Performance Explorer product. ROA and PEX uniquely correlate routing and performance data, which helps you immediately identify how routing behavior affects network performance, or how network performance affects service delivery.
If you want to find out more about ROA and Performance Explorer, and how it can help you improve network troubleshooting, fault fixing, and planning, contact us today for a demo.