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NetPath Best Practices

I would appreciate anyone assistance.    Looking to implement NetPath at my location.

Trying to understand who would be my best customers. 

Network Team and Application.

Can you please tell me if there is a NetPath users guide?

I would like to know best practices in using this tool.  

Thanks

David

  • Hi Lindsey,

    Thanks for information.

    I am new to SolarWinds.

    Can you tell me what is the best practices for using this tool. How do you market NetPath? Who are your customers……Network and Application Teams?

    I work for a larger firm and cannot see me create NetPath service for every allocation out in production infrastructure.

    How do you use this tool…..do you get a request from a user to build NetPath service?

    Appreciate your time

    David

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  • David, I'm in Networking, and my team manages our Solarwinds suite of products.

    We rely on NetPath to troubleshoot issues with WAN services, and here's an example:

    Partner Site A allowed us to install a VPN appliance within their network, to facilitate installation and use of a PC owned and managed by my company, which is operated by one of our employees who visits Partner Site A.

    Our employee using that computer reports that that the application stopped working properly, and the application vendor said the issue was due to high latency that they can't support.

    IT Support staff at Partner Site A reported they weren't impeding the flow, and the latency they measured to the Internet is acceptably low.

    My team was tasked with finding why latency statistics were reported as both too high and acceptable.  NetPath did that for us, in a graphic and complete manner.

    NetPath showed the issue was caused by high latency introduced into the circuit deeper within the Internet between two higher-level ISP's.

    NetPath identified all the intermediate hops between my organization and the PC, and it showed the full BGP redundancy along multiple paths, and also the differing latency across those various paths.  This enabled us to find a connection between two third-party ISPs that experienced very high latency occasionally.

    Bringing this information to those two ISP's gave them the info needed to reveal that the link between those two was occasionally completely congested, resulting in high latency and dropped packets.

    Better still was the way NetPath recorded network path changes and associated latency, and we leveraged that when Partner Site A recabled and rerouted their connections to temporarily bypass that inter-ISP-choke point and reported the issue resolved on a temporary basis.  NetPath records made it possible for us to see the physical link and BGP path changes,  when they were made, and confirmed that the new hops bypassed the problem points.  It also showed the latency was again low enough for the application to work properly via VPN.

    NetPath then facilitated the discovery of Partner Site A reworking their connections and paths so that the latency returned.

    We found a LOT more information using NetPath than we had using simple traceroute.  NetPath is aware of all resilient BGP paths that traceroute can't show. NetPath displayed their latency and the likelihood of which path will be taken.

    Even better, I set up NetPath to show both the Internal VPN path and and the discovered External ISP BGP path, along with any resilience and latency for every leg on each path.

    Internal VPN path:

    pastedImage_1.png

    External BGP path:

    pastedImage_0.png

    Perhaps the sweetest icing on the cake is that NetPath allows me to go back in time and see how the paths and latency change.  I don't know how we could have brought the ISP's involved to the table without NetPath.

  • Thanks for responding to my email…..your response was very helpful

    David

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