Business and Network Challenges
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is an important initiative in many enterprises today. Purpose built for delivering multimedia voice, video and data in prioritized QoS classes, IT organizations are rolling out MPLS upgrades to regional and remote offices as they look for new ways to lower cost, extend scalability, improve reliability, and secure their networked data. However, the packet labeling and/or security services characteristic of MPLS networks (e.g., encryption and VPNs) typically obscures views into application flows and activity in MPLS trunks. Ensuring high quality delivery of all applications and services across an MPLS network, at all times, for all offices and users is essential for today’s enterprises. Due to this masking of visibility, some of the issues that IT organizations face when transitioning to an MPLS environment include:
- Maintaining network visibility when migrating from Frame Relay or ATM
- Managing capacity and budget planning activities
- Validating choices of tiered, QoS-based service plans
- Troubleshooting network and application response time issues
- Consolidating reporting and analysis of all WAN technologies
NetScout Solutions Provided Needed Visibility into MPLS Networks
The nGenius Service Assurance Solution addresses the many formidable challenges faced by IT network managers implementing MPLS networks today. By deploying intelligent data sources at the LAN side of the edge router and identifying each remote site by their associated subnet address(es), traffic can be monitored centrally from the remote site perspective.
Using a single, unified service assurance solution enables IT managers to:
- Use unified real-time and historical views to gain critical visibility into application performance within MPLS environments
- Troubleshoot degradations within the MPLS environment in real time or using back-in-time forensic analysis
- Optimize delivery of converged applications across MPLS configurations
- Manage and control the cost of WAN services to avoid quality of experience issues by understanding how resources are being consumed
- Assure and validate that end-users have access to the services they need in order to meet business goals
- Predict network and application performance degradations and quickly resolve issues using automated, intelligent anomaly detection