TE Explorer

The Need for Real-Time MPLS-TE Management Visibility

Service providers and mobile operators are deploying MPLS Traffic Engineering based on the RSVP-TE label distribution protocol to ensure increasingly sensitive services with high bandwidth and low data loss requirements, such as VoIP, video, and cloud computing. Understanding the operation of TE tunnels and the interaction of traffic engineering with underlying IGP (OSPF, IS-IS and EIGRP) routing, as well as BGP Internet and MPLS VPN service routing, is critical for service assurance.

While existing traffic engineering management solutions claim to provide comprehensive visibility, in reality they deliver only static snapshot views of TE tunnel status based on occasional SNMP polling or router configuration file downloads. Important dynamics such as changes to tunnel paths, tunnel bandwidth utilization, as well as problems such as links that are unprotected by Fast Re-Route or other mechanisms, go undetected. Traditional tools don’t provide historical analysis so that engineers can see how TE tunnels have changed over time, making troubleshooting harder and more time-consuming. Finally, traditional tools don’t provide any insight into how traffic engineering interoperates with underlying routing and higher layer services. Without comprehensive, dynamic management visibility, network engineers must “fly blind”, the result being much higher MTTR and operations costs, less accurate planning and unacceptable service impacts.

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