IP/MPLSView is a network planning, design and management system, integrated into a single, powerful platform to help you intelligently plan and manage your IP network for optimal efficiency. Use IP/MPLSView to:

	Discover. Automatically discover the network topology and generate functional reports of the current infrastructure.
	Manage. To ensure maximum reliability and uptime, use IP/MPLSView to systematically monitor your network's health. Near real-time and historical views of the network utilization can be used both in an operational role as well as for capacity planning. An inventory management system enables you to leverage existing network hardware assets and minimize implementation delay.
	Simulate. Ensure network resiliency and reliability by using IP/MPLSView to validate changes to the network in a virtual, scalable environment, prior to deployment. Run "what if..." failure scenarios to pinpoint and prevent problems before they impact SLA to end users. Perform disaster recovery scenarios to assess their impact on key services.
	Design. Improve network performance by using IP/MPLSView to design and plan a low cost yet robust and efficient network. Evolving technologies are supported, including ATM/IP convergence, Layer2/3 VPN, MPLS TE, FRR, Diff-Serv TE and Inter-Area Tunnels/TE. By modeling new products and services, additional revenue streams can be realized.
	Optimize. Maximize the usage of your network from both operating and capital expense perspectives by identifying and eliminating network inefficiencies, such as poor routing or inefficient use of resources. IP/MPLSView recommends near-optimal routes, fine-tunes tunnel sizes and automatically generates new device configlets, to name just a few things. The near term savings often result in a very short ROI.

General IP/MPLSView capabilities include:

• Multi-vendor support
• Multi-layer modeling
• Multi-protocol support for IGP - OSPF, ISIS, EIGRP, RIP, static routes, etc.
• Network Configuration Import / Parsing - Builds the network topology automatically using an intelligent parser that processes user-supplied configuration files.
• Integrity Checks - Automates the detection of configuration errors and conflicts with many built-in rules distributed across various network and routing protocols and for several hardware vendors.
• Graphical User Interface - Provides extensive visibility into your network, with state-of-the-art network graphics, quick point-and-click access to relevant data, and multiple topology views for different protocols and features.
• Extensive Report Generation - Outputs relevant, detailed and useful reports. Maps can be exported to Visio and other popular graphics formats.

IP/MPLSView offers a variety of configuration, data and traffic management capabilities to help you monitor, manage and troubleshoot your IP network. Schedule a variety of management tasks, perform automatic collection of near real-time views of the network (router and tunnel configurations, operational network state), and have your entire network topology automatically displayed in a powerful and easy-to-use graphical interface. View the Layer 3 traffic data collected from the network, as well as the Layer 2 LSP tunnel load distribution (for MPLS-enabled networks), to facilitate the monitoring of LSP routes and traffic flow pattern changes. Perform network diagnostics with ease.

Discover

• Automated Data Collection - Automatic router query enables robust data collection, layout, event collection and filtering. Includes a Task Manager and Task Scheduler that schedules tasks such as Auto-Discovery or incremental discovery of the network.
• Automated Topology Construction - A Multi-vendor Parser builds up the complete multi-protocol topology from the router configuration files, taking into account network elements and state, connectivity, operational status and availability, as well as BGP connections, CoS requirements, MPLS-VPN definitions, vendor routing implementation differences, etc.
• Near-Real Time Traffic Data Collection (via SNMP) - Performs traffic load collection for interface and LSP traffic, with configurable update time intervals. Provides automatic visualization of the network utilization via charts and globally via maps.
• Traffic Import - Interface and tunnel traffic can also be imported from various sources such as MRTG, Concord eHealth, InfoVista, and other customized systems.

Manage

• Configuration Management
  • Configuration Version Control / Revision System
  • Configuration Conformance - Automates the detection of changes in configuration files, especially those that may be unintentional or problematic.
• Online Fault Management SNMP Traps/Event Browser tracks changes in network status, real-time monitoring of traps:
  • Network trap events such as node, link, tunnel, VPN, and other traps
  • Threshold crossing alerts (e.g. link/tunnel utilization or cpu/memory utilization over a certain threshold)
  • Application events
• Online Network Data Management and Diagnostics
  • Inventory Collection and Reports
  • Near-Real Time Network Monitoring
  • Network Performance Management and Diagnostics - Supports real-time router-router trace route, round trip delay / packet loss matrix, jitter measurement, etc.
• Online Traffic Management
  • Resource Utilization and Status Monitoring - Provides real-time interface traffic monitoring
  • Trending of Network and Interface Traffic
  • Historical Traffic Reports, Traffic Data Replay

IP/MPLSView is the ideal platform for performing network engineering tasks as well as short-term and strategic long-term network planning. Whether your network project involves network architecture design or redesign, troubleshooting, network migration, new technology deployment, network optimization or tuning, count on IP/MPLSView to deliver fast, accurate and reliable results.

Simulate

• Routing Simulation - Supports all major routing protocols (OSPF, ISIS, EIGRP, RIP, etc.)
• Resiliency Analysis - Tests the survivability of the network under various failure/outage scenarios, ranging from point-and-click interactive failure scenario analysis to exhaustive failure simulations of network elements (nodes, links, sites, SRLG, etc.). Traffic load data can be incorporated into the resiliency tests to examine resulting network utilizations, including the peak/worst-case. Extensive failure simulation reports and summaries.
• What-if Simulation - Validate innumerable changes in the network before deployment.
• Traffic Load Analysis - Examine period-by-period or peak/worst case network utilization via maps, charts and reports. Traffic load data can be imported offline from various sources. Or, use IP/MPLSView's traffic generation tools to study the impact of different traffic patterns.
• Tomogravity Model - Derives a plausible end-to-end traffic matrix from interface traffic measurements to enable a variety of "what-if" studies.

Design

• Basic Design - Designs a network from scratch (a "greenfield" design), or incrementally (to enhance an existing network), to satisfy end-to-end traffic flows. Achieves low cost topology designs via user-specified customizable tariffs/pricing tables that are incorporated into IP/MPLSView's sophisticated design algorithms.
• Diversity/Resiliency Design - Ensures capacity is available to reroute traffic in the event of various failure scenarios, depending on the level of robustness required by the user.
• Capacity Planning / Traffic Growth - Determines if there is sufficient available capacity and if not, where more should be added. Determines which links can be pruned without compromising resiliency constraints. Displays the impact of forecasted traffic growth on the network to help you make recommendations on future network expansion.
• Demand Sizing - Automatically sizes demands, or flows, based on traffic load.

Optimize

• Network Grooming
- Identify inefficient routing that may result over time from the dynamic rerouting of flows due to network failures, and generate optimal placement paths for these.
• Bottleneck Analysis - Pinpoints existing or potential bottlenecks in the network.
• Cost Optimization - Optimizes the network for low cost while satisfying user-specified resiliency requirements. Identifies network objects, such as links, that can be pruned or suggests lower cost alternatives for the network topology. This is achieved via customizable tariffs/pricing tables that are incorporated into IP/MPLSView's sophisticated design engine.
• Metric Optimization - Intelligent algorithm suggests new link metrics/distances to minimize the uilization of the most heavily-used links.

IP/MPLSView offers a variety of special features, depending on your network needs. These are categorized under the sections IP, MPLS-TE and MPLS VPN below.

IP

• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) - Supports Inter-AS policy routing and capacity planning. IP network planners can use IP/MPLSView to quickly investigate various BGP routing and peering scenarios via modifications to BGP attributes. What-if studies - for example, the impact of changing local preferences or BGP communities on inter-AS traffic - can be accurately and automatically assessed prior to deployment.
• Class of Service (CoS) - Supports multiple class-mapping (e.g. DSCP, MPLS experimental bits), Class-Based Weighted Fair Queuing (CB-WFQ) implementation of CoS, policy-mapping.
• Multicast - Models PIM-DM/SM/SDM and other varieties, shared (RP) and SPT distribution trees.
• Hardware Equipment Model - Supports network equipment inventory view, pricing and reporting.
• Voice over IP (VoIP) - Supports VoIP backbone capacity design, VoIP traffic generation, VoIP call setup path trace and delay calculations

MPLS-TE

For the MPLS-enabled network, IP/MPLSView supports the following Traffic Engineering (TE) capabilities.

• Multi-layer, multi-protocol modeling according to exact equipment details- Simulates and models standard IGP routing. Accurately simulates the behavior and interaction of the MPLS TE tunnel layer and the IP traffic layer. Supports administrative weights, 32-bit affinity/mask (admin-group), special tunnels such as GB-TE, strict and loose routes, primary and secondary routes, back-up routes, prioritized routing paths, etc.
• LSP Path Computation (Primary/Standby/Secondary)
• Bottleneck/Congestion Analysis - Pinpoints potential trouble spots in the network before problems occur. Performs LSP reroute optimization.
• Multi-layered Failure Simulation - Provides a clear picture of the impact of extensive node, link and facility failures across layers.
• MPLS LSP Path Generation / Network Grooming - As the network changes or grows, some Label Switched Paths (LSPs) become less optimal. To maintain load balancing and predictability, IP/MPLSView can be used repeatedly to recommend new LSPs, which it saves into router format, ready to be loaded back into the network
• End-to-end Path Protection - Performs Primary/Backup LSP Path Computation. Automates the design and simulation of the end-to-end diverse backup paths for protecting primary LSP paths.
• Tunnel Sizing - Fine-tunes LSP tunnel sizes based upon measured tunnel traffic.
• LSP Configlet Generation - Automates the generation of delta configuration files, or configlets, for MPLS TE provisioning.
• Fast Reroute (FRR) - Automates the design and simulation of FRR node and link protection, providing SONET-like restoration capabilities.
• Differentiated Services Traffic Engineering (DS-TE) - Models CoS capabilities to achieve customer-specific Quality of Service requirements. Supports single-class and multi-class DS-TE LSPs.
• Point to Multi-Point (P2MP) TE
• MPLS Inter-Area TE - Models MPLS tunnels across multiple OSPF areas
• Tunnel Event Viewer

MPLS VPN

IP/MPLSView helps you to simplify VPN planning and management. IP/MPLSView helps to ensure successful delivery of VPN Service Level Agreements (SLA) by enabling the user to monitor the VPN SLAs between the Provider Edge (PE) and Customer Edge (CE) in real time.

• Supports L3VPN, L2 Kompella, L2 Martini, CCC, VPLS (LDP-based), VPLS (BGP-based)
• VPN Topology Views
• VPN Validation/Integrity Checks
• VPN Diagnostics