Packet Design Explorer Suite

The Packet Design Explorer network service assurance suite fills a key management gap. While SNMP, log, NetFlow, DPI and other tools are ubiquitous, none provides visibility into how routing behavior affects service delivery across the network. More than a decade ago, Packet Design recognized the need to fill this void. Today, network engineers, architects, planners and operators responsible for managing the largest, most complex networks in the world, depend on the Explorer products to ensure critical services are delivered optimally and reliably. When NMS or OSS dashboards are green but customers are complaining of poor service quality, Packet Design tells them why.

With its unique fusion of routing, traffic flow and performance analytics, the Explorer suite delivers:• Real-time monitoring of network-wide IGP/BGP routing behavior with intuitive triage workflows• Alerts to anomalous routing events that can affect network performance and resiliency• Visibility into the paths, devices and traffic flows that comprise specific services, such as L2/L3 VPNs• End-to-end and hop-by-hop latency and performance metrics• DVR-like replay of network routing behavior for troubleshooting intermittent problems• Interactive modeling of planned network changes to avoid unintended consequences• Simulation of failure scenarios to help ensure network resilience is engineered in• Routing and traffic analytics to understand peering relationships and manage costs

The Packet Design SDN Management and Orchestration (MANO) Platform, built on the Explorer technology, is the first open and vendor-agnostic set of integrated capabilities to provide visibility and control of physical and virtual resources in the core network, and the overlay services that run over it. Its open RESTful APIs give early adopters easy access to the functions needed to develop their own custom SDN orchestration applications, enrich self-service portals, and integrate with OSS and BSS tools. By supporting both existing and SDN-enabled network infrastructure, Packet Design is helping operators deploy advanced services at their own pace and without forklift upgrades.

The Packet Design SDN Traffic Engineering (SDN-TE) application is an example of the intelligent orchestration capabilities that can be achieved with Packet Design’s SDN MANO Platform. The SDN-TE application leverages the Platform’s rich network telemetry and analytics to automate the difficult and time-consuming task of balancing network loads. It does this by creating tunnels to shift loads from heavily-congested links to lightly-used links. This results in better overall use of network resources and smoother service delivery. The SDN-TE application taps into several of the Platform’s services via the open APIs, including real-time and historical routing, traffic and RSVP-TE telemetry, predictive modeling and optimization, policy setting, and orchestration via open source SDN controllers.