In SolarWinds NPM 2026.1 (Radium), we addressed the issue of missing context on routing problems by significantly enriching the routing data. This enhancement provides the detailed context need to effectively troubleshoot routing issues, improving their ability to diagnose and resolve problems more efficiently.
From Raw Routing Data to Routing Insights
Routing visibility has existed as a collection of raw data points. Routing tables, neighbor states, VRFs, and flapping routes were all available—but they lived in separate views, disconnected from one another. All the data existed, but the relationships between them did not.
Why Correlation Was Necessary
Routing is not flat data; it is inherently relational. Routes depend on next hops, next hops depend on peers, peers depend on interfaces, and interfaces exist within VRFs.
Routing Insights was built to bridge this gap by turning isolated metrics into a connected routing model .
At the core of Routing Insights is a simple but powerful concept: Next Hop → Peer → Interface → VRF . By enriching routing tables and neighbours with this shared context, routing data shifts from static lists to actionable insight.
Radium introduces the first phase of Routing Insights, built around two foundational capabilities:
1. Routing Table Enrichment
2. Routing Peer (Neighbor) Enrichment
Routing Table Enrichment: Seeing the Full Forwarding Path
What We Had Before – Routing Table Widgets
The routing table view focused on protocol-level facts:
- Destination network and CIDR
- Next-hop IP
- Interface index
- Route source or protocol
- Metric values
Each route is enriched with:
- Forwarding Interface Context
Routes are mapped to the actual interface used for forwarding — including interface name and state. - VRF Awareness
Routes are associated with their VRF, making it clear whether an issue impacts a single tenant, service, or routing domain. - Next-Hop Correlation
Next-hop IPs are linked to monitored nodes and routing peers when available - Change Visibility
Last-changed timestamps highlight routes that are unstable or recently modified.
Routing tables are no longer just lists of prefixes.
They become contextual objects that explain:
- Which interface forwards the route
- Which VRF or service the route belongs to
- Whether the next hop is stable or flapping
- When and how often the route has changed
Routing Peers: Bringing Control-Plane Health Into Focus
What We Had Before – Routing Neighbor Widgets
Neighbour widgets showed basic protocol adjacency data:
- Neighbor IP address
- Protocol (OSPF, EIGRP, BGP)
- Session state
- Remote ASN (where available)
- Last change timestamp
Radium introduces routing peer enrichment and visibility, surfacing critical control-plane signals that were previously buried or disconnected.
You can now see:
- BGP, OSPF, and EIGRP neighbors in a unified Routing Neighbors dashboard
- Peer identity and role (including ASN context for BGP)
- Peer health and status, including admin state and last error (where supported)
- Peer flap counts, making instability visiblel
With correlation and enrichment:
- Route flaps can be traced directly to unstable peers
- Peer issues can be tied to interface health
- VRF impact is immediately visible
This Is Just the Beginning
Radium is Phase 1 of Routing Insights.
By enriching routing data with operational context, we’ve laid the groundwork for what comes next:
- Routing Summary Dashboard [Across Network]
- VLAN-STP and Port channel Enrichments
- Routing-aware root cause analysis
- Smarter alert correlation and suppression
