Part 7 in a series adapted from Joel Trammell’s Keynote Speech at NetQoS Symposium 2008

Think back three years ago. Back then, how many of you had an MPLS environment?

The carriers have been busy. And in that MPLS environment you lose visibility.

So how do you quantify how the performance has changed and how that carrier network is performing? After all, carriers claimed that by going to MPLS you would get better performance. But since they don't really monitor their own networks, how would they know? With MPLS, you don’t have a lot of data to validate whether it has improved performance. The ability to quantify how that carrier network is performing is critically important.

Additionally, how do you gain traffic visibility into the traffic flows, such as voice, that can now, instead of being in a traditional hub and spoke design, go from any location to any other location? The ability to understand the traffic flows without having to put devices out at each of your local sites to get visibility back into that traffic is crucial.

Finally, anomaly detection is important because often we see with MPLS routing changes that “just occur” that often affect performance. Suddenly the route changes on a major protocol, unknown to you, and suddenly performance is dramatically affected. So, you'll detect that in response time but you'll also see it in changes in traffic flows that will show up in anomaly detection.