A recent study titled “Real-Time Traffic Engineering Management With Route Analytics” by PacketDesign is one of the more in-depth studies of the facts that can impact netflow.

Increasing numbers of service providers and mobile operators are using RSVP-TE based traffic engineering to provide bandwidth reservation and data-loss protection for MPLS tunnels, the study finds, “and to increase the predictability of traffic delivery. Deployments range from low numbers of ad-hoc TE tunnels to full tunnel meshes between core or even edge routers.”

Unfortunately, the study’s authors say, “while providing network managers with the means to implement specific routing policies, traffic engineering today suffers from a lack of visibility into the real-time, dynamically changing states of traffic engineering tunnels.”

As is the case with other IP network technologies, they say, the lack of proper management visibility doesn’t prevent the deployment, provisioning and fundamental operation of traffic engineering, since aside from initial configuration, it is the routers themselves that run the algorithms and protocols that actually implement and realize TE tunnel operations in the network.

“However, lack of proper visibility significantly raises the cost of operating, troubleshooting, maintaining and planning traffic engineered networks, for the following reasons:”

Insufficient Monitoring

Without real-time, detailed monitoring of TE tunnels, network operators can’t easily detect critical network issues that may affect large sets of customers. This means that network operators must take much more time to clearly identify the nature of emerging problems. Over time, this extra time consumption will exert a costly overhead on network operations and impact customer service quality.

Dramatically Higher MTTR

Without a detailed troubleshooting history of TE tunnel changes over time, network engineers who receive trouble ticket escalations are left with very little to work with. The result is that it takes far longer to resolve problems, and many problems remain unsolved. Ultimately, the lack of timely problem resolution affects the customer quality of experience, leading to increased churn and reacquisition costs.

Inaccurate Planning, Costly Maintenance Mistakes

Without a holistic and accurate view of complex and inter-working routing, TE tunnels and traffic flows, it is simply too easy to make costly mistakes both in longer-term capacity planning as in routine maintenance. Such inaccuracies reduce network engineering efficiency and productivity, increase SLA payouts and lower service quality, leading to top and bottom-line impacts.

Higher risk of service failures and impacts. Without monitoring of tunnel protection mechanisms such as secondary tunnels, FRRs and SRLG analysis of facility diversity, there is no way for network engineers to ensure that infrastructure failures won’t cause service traffic delivery failures or degradations.