White Paper Monitoring the WAN

Transcription

1 White Paper Monitoring the WAN Juniper Networks, Inc North Mathilda Avenue Sunnyvale, CA USA or 888 JUNIPER Part Number: Aug. 2005

2 Introduction...3 The Ideal Monitoring Solution: Beyond Just Monitoring...3 WAN Monitoring at Work...4 Ending the Blame Game...4 Troubleshooting...5 WAN Optimization and Capacity Planning...5 How Juniper Networks Answers the Monitoring Needs...6 Compression & Caching...6 Acceleration...6 Application Control...6 Visibility...7 Juniper Networks at Work: Optimizing WAN Performance...7 Scenario 1: Ending the Blame Game...7 Scenario 2: Troubleshooting...8 Scenario 3: WAN Optimization and Capacity Planning...9 WAN Monitoring: Key to Network Optimization Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc.

3 Introduction The distributed nature of today s typical enterprise, and in particular the lack of local IT staff in remote locations, presents IT with a series of operational and infrastructure challenges. Virtually every organization needs to tightly integrate remote facilities into the overall business, but without IT staff at those sites, centralized network managers have a hard time gaining critical information for deployment and planning decisions. Central staff also typically lack the visibility needed to troubleshoot problems or restore performance levels. Increasing budget pressures mean these challenges are here to stay. The average company spends As a result, application roll-out and deployment decisions typically rely on incomplete or anecdotal data, more than $216,000 per year leading to wasted time, effort, and money. troubleshooting remoteaccess services. Troubleshooting is similarly affected; without on-site resources, IT spends an inordinate amount of time and money chasing remote problems, often at the expense of - Nemertes Research more strategic issues. According to a recent study by independent research firm Nemertes Research, the average 1,000-person company spends more than $216,000 per year troubleshooting outages on fixed remote-access services and that s just to identify the trouble. Applying the traditional 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of the time is spent finding the problem and 20 percent fixing it, those costs could grow an additional $50,000 per year or more a very inefficient and expensive way to run a network. To overcome these challenges, IT needs visibility into the WAN environment detailed insight that allows them to monitor and record activity to understand how the network, remote users, and applications are interacting. Such visibility allows network managers to observe WAN and application behavior over time and make informed Visibility into the WAN configuration and deployment decisions. environment provides crucial When problems do occur, visibility enables IT to quickly data for configuration and determine whether the WAN is at fault and, if so, deployment decisions. rapidly identify, isolate, and resolve the issue to quickly restore business operations. The Ideal Monitoring Solution: Beyond Just Monitoring A comprehensive WAN monitoring solution would give IT better visibility into, and control over, their complex application environment, helping them understand WAN behavior and improve overall performance. Such a solution would benefit IT in three primary areas: First, when a problem that impacts business-critical operations occurs, WAN monitoring should allow IT to quickly determine whether the problem is network related. Since the network is typically blamed for every problem, initial troubleshooting focuses on it, even though statistically the network is the culprit only 30 percent of the time. An effective WAN monitoring solution could quickly eliminate the WAN as the source, pointing IT in the right direction and allowing network managers to focus on more important issues. What if the problem is WAN related? An effective WAN monitoring solution should then assist in the troubleshooting effort by providing insight into WAN activity such as traffic Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc. 3

4 volume, top talkers, bandwidth consumption, and high-usage times. Such information would direct troubleshooters to the source of a problem, leading to a prompt resolution. Finally, WAN monitoring should also provide detailed insight into the demands of both new and existing applications, information that IT can use to optimize performance today while planning for future expansion. Using traffic and application reports, network managers can finetune policies and bandwidth settings to maximize existing resources based on current requirements. In addition, by providing a historical record of performance over time, Key Goals of WAN Monitoring: Eliminate the WAN as the problem Quickly troubleshoot problems Long-term planning and deployment WAN monitoring would reveal trends that network managers can use to project and proactively plan for future growth as well as to justify the procurement of new equipment to support that growth. Similarly, WAN monitoring performance reports could also be used to confirm that outside providers are meeting their service level agreements (SLAs) or to provide evidence if they are not. A WAN monitoring solution with all these features would certainly provide helpful troubleshooting, but it would still be incomplete. To fully meet IT s needs, a comprehensive WAN monitoring solution must also help resolve the problems it identifies. Rather than introducing the need for additional point products for problem resolution, WAN monitoring must be a component of a larger WAN optimization solution a single platform that both isolates problems and provides an array of integrated tools that help fix these problems and improve overall WAN performance. By investing in products that consolidate multiple tools within a single solution, IT can make the best use of their limited budgets and reduce the learning curve for technicians and network managers. In addition to combining multiple capabilities within a single platform, the ideal WAN monitoring solution should provide key detection and resolution services automatically. Colorful GUIs and online reports are informative, but they require the network manager to act on them. By automating the fault detection, isolation, and resolution process, network managers can make even better use of their time skipping the hours needed to consult management screens and reports. WAN Monitoring at Work Ending the Blame Game An effective WAN monitoring solution must assist IT in quickly addressing three primary needs: isolating performance problems to end the blame game, troubleshooting to resolve the source of a problem, and network optimization and capacity planning. Monitoring helps pinpoint application-specific performance issues to quickly identify viruses Despite the myriad tools available, problem and other network problems. resolution is still largely a process of elimination. For network managers, the first order of business is to narrow the search by determining as quickly as possible where the problem resides. When a problem occurs, the network is often blamed first. WAN monitoring can help quickly determine whether the WAN is at fault by providing network managers with detailed 4 Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc.

5 visibility into application traffic as it traverses the WAN. Such visibility allows network managers to review and compare traffic levels across the WAN to determine whether all applications are impacted indicating that the WAN is at fault or if the problem is confined to a single application, eliminating the WAN as a suspect and focusing IT s troubleshooting efforts on the true issue. By directing technicians to the source of the problem, WAN monitoring can save IT considerable time and resources, helping them quickly isolate the problem, hasten the resolution process, and restore business operations. Troubleshooting In a widely distributed enterprise supporting dozens of remote sites, tracing and isolating the source of a problem that impacts the entire network is a particular challenge. A monitoring solution that provides detailed visibility into WAN traffic can help by allowing IT to observe and compare the range and volume of specific application traffic flowing from and to individual remote sites. By looking for departures from typical traffic patterns or other unusual network behavior, network managers can quickly locate where a problem originated, which application is responsible, and even which individual desktops or users are involved. Monitoring the traffic flow allows IT to see exactly what kind of throughput the network is providing. Armed with that information, the appropriate IT group can be dispatched directly to the afflicted site to correct the problem, making the most efficient use of limited resources and taking guesswork out of the game. WAN Optimization and Capacity Planning One of the most important roles a WAN monitoring solution can play is providing insight into how the distributed enterprise is supporting overall business objectives and how the WAN is evolving as a critical business communications tool. Applications the tools that enable users to perform their daily jobs and maintain high levels of productivity are the lifeblood of any business. The WAN is the medium over which distributed users employ and share these applications. By providing visibility into how business-critical users and applications are interacting with the WAN over time, a monitoring solution allows network managers to make intelligent, informed decisions about new application roll-outs, bandwidth allocation, network expansion, and a host of other issues that impact business operations. WAN monitoring also provides information that IT can use with senior management to justify additional resources. The reports provide visible and persuasive evidence that helps justify the procurement of new equipment, defend network configuration or application deployment decisions, and provide hard evidence that providers are or are not meeting their SLAs. Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc. 5

6 How Juniper Networks Answers the Monitoring Needs Juniper Networks offers a complete family of solutions that provide IT with a range of technologies designed to overcome the technical limitations of WANs and speed the delivery of mission-critical applications across wide-area links. Two members of that family the WX and the WXC application acceleration platforms specifically deliver powerful WAN monitoring capabilities that dramatically reduce IT s time to resolution by providing actionable information that can be used to quickly pinpoint performance problems and causes. Best of all, these services are delivered as part of a larger WAN optimization solution that helps businesses improve performance and maximize their wide-area environments at minimum costs. The WX and WXC platforms are based on Juniper Networks unique WX Framework, which defines specific attributes that a WAN optimization and application acceleration platform needs to The Integrated WX Framework address the bandwidth, latency, congestion, and manageability issues that impede application performance over the WAN. Each element of the WX Framework addresses a specific challenge that helps improve the flow of critical data over wide-area links. Compression & Caching The WX Framework delivers compression, via Molecular Sequence Reduction (MSR ), to reduce traffic flows over the WAN. The company s Network Sequence Caching technique eliminates large redundant patterns of data, further increasing available WAN capacity. Acceleration The Packet Flow Acceleration (PFA ) technologies reduce the impact of latency on TCPbased applications, speeding response times. The Application Flow Acceleration (AppFlow ) technology augments TCP acceleration with protocol-specific acceleration for applications such as Exchange, Microsoft file services, and web-based applications, pipelining multiple data blocks and web objects across the WAN simultaneously to reduce wait times and improve user productivity. Application Control The Quality of Service (QoS) and other bandwidth-management tools enable IT to prioritize business-critical applications, while Policy-based Multipath allows IT to define which applications should follow which path for sites with multiple WAN links. 6 Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc.

7 Visibility What enables feedback amongst these integrated features are the WX Framework s visibility tools, including the WX Central Management System (CMS ) software. The WX CMS software, along with the WebView device management software, provide IT with unified insight into their distributed applications and networks. While the performance and bandwidth-optimization features of the WX and WXC platforms justify their initial deployment, the easy-to-use monitoring and analysis tools, coupled with unprecedented visibility into WAN performance, make the Juniper Networks solution an investment that continues paying dividends well into the future. Juniper Networks at Work: Optimizing WAN Performance The monitoring capabilities of the WX and WXC application acceleration and WAN optimization platforms enable IT to improve overall WAN performance. Scenarios can best illustrate how the WX CMS and the other visibility tools isolate performance problems, aid in troubleshooting, and enable network optimization and capacity planning. Scenario 1: Ending the Blame Game Setting: A large national corporation with a central campus supporting multiple remote offices throughout the U.S. The help desk receives a call from one of the remote sites complaining that users cannot reach the server. The caller s initial diagnosis is that the WAN is down. For IT, the first step is to determine whether the problem is indeed with the WAN. A quick glance at the Performance Report tells the IT technician that latency and loss are within acceptable levels, eliminating the WAN as the culprit. The Application Summary report shows the percent of bandwidth each application is using, providing IT with quick insights about traffic patterns and bandwidth consumption. Next, IT must narrow down the search and determine if all applications at the remote site are affected or if it s just that is failing. By pulling up a WX CMS Application Summary Report, the technician gets an at-a-glance view of current traffic levels for all applications running to the remote site. The report shows that traffic levels are normal for everything except , which has fallen to virtually zero a significant clue. To further isolate the problem, the technician next wants to look at individual transactions to gain more clues. The technician can use the WX platform to perform a packet Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc. 7

8 capture and then submit those packets to a diagnostic tool for analysis. The packet capture process reveals that the server is refusing all connections. Armed with this information, the IT technician approaches the team, which performs its own investigation and discovers that the process on the server supporting the remote site in question has failed. The problem is quickly resolved, and service at the site is promptly restored. Using the WX CMS software, IT was able to quickly end the finger pointing by eliminating the WAN as a suspect and narrowing the search to the server. By providing the team with detailed performance information, IT helped them identify and fix the problem. WX CMS & WX/WXC Platform Tools Used: Performance Report Application Summary Report Packet Capture Scenario 2: Troubleshooting Setting: A highly distributed international organization with 40 remote sites around the globe. The IT group receives reports that half the remote sites are unreachable, while the others are operating normally. With nothing more to go on, IT s first course of action is to review performance data from operational sites in search of clues about what is afflicting the down locations. Looking for statistics about transmitted vs. dropped traffic, the IT staff turns to the WX CMS software s QoS report. The QoS report shows that large amounts of traffic are being dropped because the total traffic being sent exceeds the percentage of bandwidth allocated to that application. The network manager gleans two important pieces of information from this report. First, it tells her that the WX CMS QoS controls are working, since they are preventing from consuming too much bandwidth at The QoS Report shows IT the throughput as well as the dropped packets for applications, alerting IT to spikes in traffic. the expense of other applications. Second, it shows a dramatic and unexplained spike in e- mail traffic, causing the network manager to suspect that a virus might be responsible for the 8 Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc.

9 sudden traffic load increase. The network manager now works with the desktop group to identify whether updated virus patches are needed to stop the virus. The desktop group decides to send out patch updates, and the network manager keeps monitoring patterns to see whether the updates eliminate the problem. The network manager notices an unusually high amount of traffic still being generated at one remote site. Opening a Traffic Flow report, the network manager drills down and discovers that the two top talkers at the site are still producing huge amounts of , indicating that something is still amiss and a virus might still be present. The network manager tells the desktop group to examine the two top talkers. They discover that those systems were overlooked in the initial patch distribution. After they are patched, the network manager confirms that traffic levels have fallen back to normal and the remote sites are reachable again. Thanks to the detailed QoS, Traffic Flow, and Top Talker reports, the network manager was able to pinpoint the source of the problem, speeding the resolution effort and quickly restoring normal operations. WX CMS & WX/WXC Platform Tools Used: QoS Report Top Talker Traffic Reports Scenario 3: WAN Optimization and Capacity Planning Setting: A company supporting multiple satellite sales offices is rolling out a new MPLS-based virtual private network (VPN) to complement its reliable but aging frame relay solution. The VPN was originally meant to support a new ERP application, but IT was reluctant to trust such a critical application to the still-untested MPLS network until they were sure the service provider could deliver on the company s very aggressive SLAs. In response, the company decided to move all e- mail and backup traffic to the MPLS VPN, where IT could monitor and evaluate its performance, while ERP and voice over IP (VoIP) traffic remained on the proven frame relay network. IT uses the WX Framework s Policy-based Multipath feature to direct and storage traffic to the MPLS-based VPN, opening sufficient bandwidth on the frame relay network to The Policy-based Multipath feature enables IT to define which applications should follow which path in sites with multiple WAN links. IT can monitor links for latency and loss statistics and see if Multipath moved applications to the alternate path. Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc. 9

10 reliably support the ERP and VoIP applications. To evaluate the VPN provider s performance, IT sets latency and loss thresholds as part of the Multipath policy, using the same levels as defined on the frame relay links. These settings enable IT to monitor the new provider s SLAs, creating a de facto compliance-monitoring tool. If the provider passes the test, the company reasons, IT can roll out new applications with a high degree of confidence. Several weeks later, the Multipath Performance Report reveals that, on several occasions, latency on the VPN exceeded the threshold an SLA violation. The company records the data, produces a hard-copy report, and shows the results to the service provider. Presented with hard evidence of its noncompliance, the provider agrees to upgrade the network, refund that month s service fee, and redouble its efforts to meet SLAs. The scrutiny pays off: Three months later, the upgrade is complete, and the provider is consistently meeting and often exceeding the established SLAs. Happy with the performance and the provider s swift response to initial concerns, the company plans to migrate the entire WAN to the MPLS-based VPN with a high degree of confidence. Visibility from the real-time performance analysis in the Multipath reports gave IT the insights needed to enforce SLAs and evaluate a new provider. In addition to planning for the migration, the company also used other WX Framework features to make sure it was getting full usage from the existing bandwidth. Utilizing the QoS tool, the company reviewed and adjusted policy settings and bandwidth allocations for all applications on both the VPN and the frame relay network, improving overall performance and preparing the system to accommodate future projected expansion. WX CMS and WX/WXC Platform Tools Used: Policy-based Multipath Multipath Performance Report QoS Report WAN Monitoring: Key to Network Optimization As IT resources continue to shrink, businesses are seeking ways to compensate. WAN monitoring plays an important role, providing critical centralized visibility into how the WAN, applications, and remote users are operating. By allowing IT to observe and record WAN behavior as it relates to business operations, WAN monitoring solutions can help location where a problem originates, isolate the cause and source of the problem, and provide historical performance information that allows IT to optimize current performance while effectively planning for future growth and expansion. Juniper Networks delivers a complete WAN monitoring solution via the WX CMS software. Working with the WX and WXC application acceleration platforms, the WX CMS software helps IT end the blame game, focus and streamline their troubleshooting efforts, and optimize WAN performance through SLA-compliance monitoring and effective capacity planning. A customizable My WAN web portal simplifies the task of getting at-a-glance feedback on particular data and locations. The WX CMS software is part of a larger, integrated WAN optimization solution that maximizes infrastructure investments, addresses the multitude of WAN challenges, simplifies management, and reduces complexity by eliminating the need for multiple point products. 10 Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc.

11 Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Juniper Networks and the Juniper Networks logo are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks in this document are the property of Juniper Networks or their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice. Juniper Networks assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document or for any obligation to update information in this document. Juniper Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this publication without notice. Copyright 2005, Juniper Networks, Inc. 11