RouteExplorer™ Tutorial -- Visualization

Highlight the IP route between two points in your network for scenarioplanning

Seeing the IP paths taken by traffic from a source router toa destination router in your multi-domain network is very useful for networkplanning. There may be paths of high importance in your network such as a VoIPservice path between an IP PBX and a PSTN media gateway that would not toleratesignificantly increased delay resulting from a possible rerouting due to linkor router failures. 

 

Route Explorer can quickly show you the path resolvedbetween two points in your network currently or at any point in recordedtopology history. The path will be highlighted in yellow.  Each segment of the route may belisted, along with the link metric and the prefix by which each next hop wasresolved.  See Figure1.

 

Figure 1

Having thus highlighted a route, you may then wish to seethe effects of link failures or metric changes to this route.  Route Explorer can easily recalculatenew routes and display them.  Tosimulate a link failure simply right click on a link and click on “Down”.  Figure2shows the effect of two simulated link outages on the path above.  Note that the down links are shown inred. A list of simulated changes (“edits”) to links can be displayed.

Figure 2

Link metric changes can also be simulated to see the effectsof traffic engineering changes to particular paths. Figure3shows the effect of a link metric change on our path. 

Figure 3

What would happen if one or two core routers went down in acascade failure?  Route Explorercan show you how the path would be rerouted in that case.  See Figure4.

 

Figure 4

 

HOW TO:

  1. Open the “DemoTier1ISPJun02” topology
  2. Highlight a route:
    1. Right-click on source router
    2. Click “Route Source” in node pop-up menu
    3. Right-click on destination router
    4. Click “Route Destination” in pop-up
  3. Down a link:
    1. Right-click on link
    2. Click “Down” in link pop-up menu
  4. Change metric:
    1. Right-click on link
    2. Click “Set Metric” in link pop-up menu
    3. Enter metrics in resulting dialog and click on “set”
  5. Down a router:
    1. Right-click on a router
    2. Click “Down” in node pop-up
  6. Show all link/router simulated changes: Select Tools->List Router/Link Edits
  7. Restore edits:
    1. Click on “Restore All” in list of edits
    2. Up the individual links or nodes via pop-up menu (right-click on item)

 

 

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