Multicast Troubleshooting & Understanding Ip Multicast Routing - Packet design

Hi, I'm Matt Sherrod with Packet Design. And today, we're going to walk through the multicast feature set that we have within our Route Explorer family. Looking here, what I have is we have a lab configuration where we've got four POPS, all built with P&P equipment. If you look here, we have our San Jose POP, our Los Angeles, our DC, and our New York. What I'll pull up are the reports that we can now show to visualize your multicast tree. Really focused around being able to solve those very difficult problems of coming in and trying to troubleshoot when somebody calls and complains about the inability to view a channel, or to be able to see a certain broadcast event. Executive video. The ability very rapidly understand how that tree is laid out in your existing infrastructure where it's misconfigured, and then be able to very rapidly solve that problem. I'm pulling up here now just one of our S comma G environments. One of our router groups. I'm going to look here at this particular tree. Now notice how on the actual topology, it highlights the routers. It highlights my RP, showing me where it is on this infrastructure. If I want a little bit more detailed view, I can pull up the mini map now, and see that here I have a source. This is where the source is connected into this router. So that's where my source is connected. I have my RP showing here. The little red arrows are showing the communication path. That PIM's enabled and is working effectively. And then, where I have my little leaf nodes shows exactly where my clients are. In this case, you can see I have some leaf nodes that are not connected into my tree. Very easy here. I'm going to select the router. Right click to come down and show me how it should be connected. Show me where the infrastructure is that I should be seeing. And if you notice, now I see this link. It's actually linked to my RP, but in fact this interface is misconfigured. I can come select here. I'm going to right click on this interface to look at the inspector. I can see here in the case of multicast, I have nine groups configured on this side of the lake, in that particular fast ethernet link. If I come look on the other side, I'll see that in fact, here, I've got four groups. I can look and see exactly what my groups that are configured, and where do I need to go into the router and reconfigure them so that I complete that tree and return these users to good performance. So, very easy to see. Isolate a particular issue. Be able to see graphically on the minimap. Now, what we're showing here is just a single multicast group, but denoted by the little red arrows. You could select multiple groups if you wanted to be able to show additional arrows and additional multicast groups on those same links. In looking at this tree, what this dashed line is actually showing us is that we're in registering states. So the tunnel that was created, we're not getting back out where we're multicasting out to this leaf node, so we have to look at the individual routers. If I select this group, you'll also see that it will highlight on the main map here. Here's that link. And you'll notice that there's no multicast traffic moving across it, as denoted by these green arrows. If we come in and look, I can right click once again, providing context sensitive information here. I'm in my Inspector view. I can come in, look at the multicast configuration, be able to show exactly how many PIM interfaces this router has, how many groups that it's involved with in addition to the one that we're looking at. And I see here that there's seven groups configured. You'll notice that the group that I'm looking at right now, sitting in that list, trying to understand where the-- here's my 224.130.1.39 showing that I'm configured here. If I go in looking at this interface and see what its configuration is, I have that same kind of view very quickly now. In this case, I have 114 groups. But what you'll notice is the configuration was not correct in this path. So once again, I can come into that particular router, being able to make that configuration change, and that tunnel will open up, and then be sending traffic back down that link like it should. So I'll bring up an event analysis. You'll notice that with an event analysis, the multicast features are very similar to our IGP and BGP capabilities, where now I can choose to do an event analysis. I'm going to pick just a small time frame here, and then have the system go through and summarize the events that we've collected. You can see now, looking at the distribution of events here, adding a multicast routing entry, a change, a drop, a PIM interface change, all of these are collected. You can, here in the summary, or you can go and filter or show events. So you have the ability, just as you do with the other protocols, to be able to drill down into interesting information. In the case of the multicast groups, the same kind of capabilities, with the addition of the ability to animate. So now, you can come in, have the system animate on the view to be able to show you exactly what's going on with those events as they occur over time. Here, we'll look, as it brings up a miniature topology of the different routers. And then, we'll be able to move those events through. As you'll see, the trees create or decay. You'll see the other kinds of, possibly an interface malfunction. Here we go. I'll bring this up so we can see it a little nicer here. But you'll notice what's it's done is selected those routers that are participating within that multicast group, and it allows me to play back over time those events. So over that time frame that I just selected, that little spy, we can see that we have a source router coming on, being added into the tree. Over time, you'll see that decaying there in blue. So it gives you a nice visual cue of what's going on that particular tree. If we look at some of the other pieces, the ability to filter by source, if I'm trying to troubleshoot an issue where I'm looking for a particular source, and seeing what events it has had, I can come in and show events for that particular source, have the event table come up, and then I can step through this as well. So, the ability to come in also to look at the entire set of events. And then, we break down and highlight where we see the particular problem. In this case it was an add multicast router happening. If we look at the drop event, once again, you can see exactly what's going on, and what interface was impacted at what time it happened across those events. We also have the ability to do planning for multicasts. You'll notice here is I enter planning mode by selecting Planning Mode here. I can now go into the multicast group, be able to add, edit, or delete multicast. And then as that's done, we can apply the traffic that we're tracking. We can apply the traffic that we're tracking across all of the different links to that new multicast group, and show exactly what load that will now place on that new tree. So we have the ability to allow you to plan for, say, if you want to merge two channels, or you'd like to take a set broadcast traffic, or executive video, see exactly what kind of impact it would have on your infrastructure. The ability to come out, edit, add, that capability. Or in this case, if we came out here to multicast, I could actually down this router and show the impact of the trees. Be able to show now this router is down. What's the path analysis? Come back, and being able to show all of my path reports for that, now that my router's down. Now I want to look at my failure analysis, now that I've made an edit to the plan and have this go and run across my multicast collection to see exactly how the path is impacted. We support all the major vendors with out multicast solution. In fact, we've optimized collection across Juniper, Alcatel, Cisco, and Huawei. We can put all of the different routers and devices that you're using in your environment to deliver multicast into a single set of reports across your entire infrastructure. Thank you for your time today. Hope this was helpful. You can find more information about our multicast feature set on the website at packetdesign.com.