Fairmont Raffles Hotels International Uses NetMRI
"Like checking my emails or drinking my coffee, opening and looking into our NetMRI has been part of my habit. This tool is just so amazing...With NetMRI, I can have a full picture on what is happening in our network. I guess things will never be the same without Netcordia's NetMRI."
—Michael Vicera, Network Analyst
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Network Analysis Tip: Unidirectional Traffic Flow
Why Is This Important?
Unidirectional (or one-way) traffic flow within your network is most likely the result an incorrect configuration, but may also be symptomatic of a larger problem related to your overall routing architecture. Since network communications are bi-directional in nature, unidirectional traffic patterns on your network mean that the traffic flow in one direction is not following the same path as the other. By design, the least cost route to a destination should also be the desired return path.
Having this condition in your network can lead not only to end-user performance problems, but also more difficulty when trying to diagnose the cause of the problem. If part of the communication flow is not traversing the path that you think it is, you will make incorrect assumptions about traffic and load levels as you examine data from the wrong part of the network.
The Manual Solution
There are many types of configuration issues that can cause this symptom to occur in your network. This is what adds to the challenge of manually trying to identify issues like unidirectional traffic flow. Organizations and IT teams don't have the time or resources to manually look for these issues before a problem occurs. Something as simple as a mis-configured bandwidth statement on one end of a connection will cause an incorrect routing calculation. Other causes could be incorrectly applied ACL's, routing statement errors and even a mis-match with router authentication.
In addition, most network traffic is not symmetrical from a data-volume perspective (small request packet, large return data packet) so spotting this condition by looking at traffic volume graphs or link utilization graphs within your network may not be easy. Most Network Management Systems (NMS) show link utilization statistics when in fact, you need to have a graph of packet counts in both directions in order to effectively use an NMS tool. Even with the right tools and graphing capabilities, most organizations don't proactively look for suboptimal configurations like unidirectional traffic flow. The culprit is typically found after hours of troubleshooting a problem that impacted network health and performance.
The Automated Solution
One of the many features of the Netcordia NetMRI product is the ability to identify and proactively notify you of this condition. By also examining router configurations for statement consistency, routing table entries and the live routing tables in your operational network, NetMRI can help you quickly pinpoint the cause of the unidirectional traffic flow condition in your network. Once a unidirectional traffic flow is identified, you can easily schedule a job or execute a command from the NetMRI interface to solve the potential issue before overall service quality and network performance are impacted.