JUNOS High Availability

Traffic Monitoring

Besides monitoring the hardware and software itself to determine the health of the network, it is also possible to use the traffic flowing through the network and the routing updates received by the network equipment to not only determine the current state of the network, but also create a baseline that can be used to determine issues that in the future could lead to network outages. It is possible to deploy JUNOS or software-based tools to monitor the traffic flows and routing updates and deliver them in a fashion that is usable to network engineers.

Traffic Monitoring Overview

When it comes to the high availability of your network, the purpose of traffic monitoring is twofold:

• To ensure that throughput levels are known and a baseline is created to ensure that anomalies in traffic flow, which could indicate network outages or degradation, are detected as quickly as possible

• To ensure that routing protocols are behaving correctly internally to the network, as well as ensure that neighboring Autonomous Systems (ASs) are not affecting your high availability by sending bogus routing announcements

Though some network engineers never worry about how their daemons are coupled or how their operating system works, it’s common to have software installed on machines that seems to steal resources from all the other software—locking up the computer and forcing a reboot. You don’t want a mistake in your SNMP process stealing resources from Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and possibly ...