RouteExplorer™ Tutorial -- Visualization

Get a complete up-to-the-minute inventory of your routed network

A large enterprise or service provider network may havehundreds of routers with thousands of prefixes advertised.  Summarization across area boundarieshelps reduce the amount of information carried across the network but also makesit difficult to quickly get to the cause of a service outage.  Design diagrams of networks are staticand get out-of-date very quickly. Configuration based inventory tools place a traffic burden on thenetwork and still don’t have up-to-the-minute information on the state of suchvital indicators as prefixes and link metrics. A network-wide inventory ofrouters, prefixes and routing adjacencies, automatically discovered andmaintained in real-time can be invaluable in maintaining a large network.

From its Tools menu, Route Explorer can show you complete,up-to-date list of prefixes advertised, routing adjacencies, and routers ineach IGP area and AS of your network. Theses lists can be sorted and filtered by prefix, prefix type, etc.  (Figure 1).  Each entry of any list can be tracedback to its associated router(s) in the topology map with a single click.

Figure 1

Using Route Explorer’s prefix list, you can easily do thefollowing tasks:

• See which routers in your network are advertising default routes
• See if a prefix is currently advertised or not and by which routers
• See what metric is advertised with each prefix
• Verify that area border routers are properly readvertising prefixes
• Show BGP prefixes advertised and the list of attributes associated with each

Figure 2is an example of the IGP prefixes advertised in a multi-area OSPF network ofprefix types Internal and AS-External.

Figure 2

Using Router Explorer’s router list (see Figure3),you can do the following:

• Verify if a particular router is currently up and running
• Verify that a router appears in the IGP area or AS it is supposed to
• Verify that a router is configured as you expect:
• has the correct IP address associated with it
• has the correct name (IS-IS)
• Show the hardware type and IOS revision of each router (EIGRP only)
• See how many total routers there are currently in your network

Figure 3

With Route Explorer’s list of Links (not shown here) you cansee the number and current state (up/down) of all routing adjacencies in yournetwork, along with their link metrics and the router interface addresses.

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HOW TO:

1. Open “DemoEnterpriseAMar03” topology
2. Click Tools->List Routers to get a router list
3. Tools->List Prefixes to get a prefix list
4. Tools->List Links to get a list of links
5. Filer each list by clicking on the “Filter By” drop down menu and selecting the appropriate options

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