If you run the Border Gateway Protocol among your own IP network domains or to exchange reachability information with your ISP, you will soon gain the option to quickly troubleshoot the root cause of BGP control-plane faults.

Start-up Packet Design says it has developed visualization techniques and a statistical algorithm for its Route Explorer route-analytics appliance that will identify the root cause of a particular network event in real time.

Flagging a single event is a Herculean feat in BGP networks because of the humongous volume of routing-update messages generated by the notoriously chatty BGP routing protocol after a significant peering loss. But the company says its algorithm - scheduled for integration into the Route Explorer later this year - can pare thousands of events into a single Syslog message.

Packet Design appliances monitor and troubleshoot the logical Layer 3 path of a packet to improve the performance of IP networks. By contrast, traditional network management systems focus on isolating faults in the physical components of a network's data-forwarding plane, such as router ports, line cards and circuits.

Using the new root-cause analysis tool, you could pinpoint a root BGP event impacting your own network's performance, even if the culprit is several network domains away - say, in a peer network of your service provider, explains Jeff Raice, Packet Design's vice president of marketing and business development.

We're hypothesizing here, but couldn't gaining this power bode well for enterprises ogling the economics of the Internet for VPNs but worried about performance levels? At least if you or your service provider have the ability to quickly identify a misconfigured routing-table entry causing the network to continually oscillate between two routes, triggering continual convergence and performance degradation, someone can quickly do something about it - wherever the problem may be.

In fact, this happened to one enterprise customer that complained of periodic, poor performance to its service provider, says Raice. Except in this case, the enterprise testing Packet Design's tool learned that the misconfiguration was in its own routing table.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.