NetBrain Workstation ---Complete workflow of network design and troubleshooting

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Home >>Solutions >> Dramatically Reduce MTTR

Challenge of troubleshooting the network

The accurate information and the normal state of the network is not available or difficult to find during the process of network troubleshooting since the network is expected to exhibit abnormal behavior. But only with complete information can troubleshooting be done quickly. Therefore it is always a good practice to keep an accurate topology map, know all network protocols in your network, benchmark normal network behavior, etc. Unfortunately for a large enterprise network, these are daunting tasks.
Every network engineer uses his own best practices which he has learned from his experience with troubleshooting. No systematic approach exists.
Troubleshooting tools available today cannot catch up with the evolution of the modern network technology. For IP networks, most network engineers still depend on ping, trace, SNMP and router show and debug commands to troubleshoot the network. Diagnosing the network problems using these ancient tools can be time-consuming

Troubleshoot with NetBrain M.P.H approach

Many network management systems focus on the monitoring and notifying of the problem. However, no good system exists to assist with troubleshooting and reducing MTTR. Considering that a network outage costs $1400 per minute, reducing MTTR can have a large financial effect and avoid the possible customer loss. A few systems try identifying the root causes automatically to reduce MTTR, but these efforts have been met with little success on mid-sized to large networks. These systems try to take the role of the engineer, but since the troubleshooting process is driven by the people's expertise, an automated system cannot truly work.

NetBrain Workstation takes a unique approach: it does not make any guess on the root cause; instead it automates hundreds of actions in a platform to help greatly reduce MTTR. These micro automation are not isolated functions, but built around our new M.P.H. solution for troubleshooting network problems. With NetBrain Workstation, a network engineer follows three steps to attack a network problem: mapping the network problem, probing from the map and holistic comparison.

Map the problem area

NetBrain Workstation provides many ways to automatically create a network map. For almost any type of network problem, you can map the problem area quickly and easily with NetBrain Workstation as shown in the following table:

Network Problem	Mapping method via NetBrain Workstation
Have a connection or performance problem between two end points	Automatically discover the path between two end points and create the map for this path
Receive an alarm of a unreachable router	Extend neighbors starting from this router
Receive an alarm of a unreachable IP address or server	Run the trace route command and create the diagram for the trace route result
Receive a syslog error about BGP neighbor	Create the diagram via the device group for this BGP routing protocol
An EIGRP route stuck-in-active	Run route analysis for this route and diagram the route analysis result

Probe from the map

NetBrain workstation allows the user to instantly monitor all devices in the map. The device and link status, device performance data and link bandwidth usage are displayed in the map so that you can immediately know the current network state. Further you can dive in to find the top talker via NetBrain IP accounting or understand the application status via IP SLA toolkit.

If you like to take a close look at a suspicious device, NetBrain provides many functions to help you. For example, Design Reader shows device configurations related to a network design or technology, IP detector decodes an IP address to your familiar hostname and provides shortcut for operations on this IP address and our powerful Procedure can guide you to collect and analyze the data.

Holistic comparison

Quite possibly the network problem is caused by the human error and therefore knowing what has been changed can help speed up troubleshooting process. NetBrain allows you to compare configuration files, routing tables, routing paths and many other type of data. NetBrain displays discrepancies of these data in easily read format. NetBrain Appliance Benchmark service and CMDB service together provide a powerful mechanism for you to benchmark your network data periodically and manage the historical data easily.