Configuration Analysis: The New Niche

“These scripts can be pretty large with thousands of lines of code per device and they are often manually configured,” he said. “And each vendor has its own language for configuration, which makes it interesting, and there are different protocols to configure. The end result is there are millions of lines of scripts for doing configuration in large IP networks.”

With this much scripting, often manual, Talpade said errors creep in causing difficult-to-resolve problems in the network. In the development process, equipment manufacturers have debugging tools for the code they use to run their boxes, but in a live network, managers need to detect these scripting errors non-intrusively.

“That’s what’s missing,” Talpade said. And it directly affects the ease-of-use factor that survey respondents ranked so highly.

Other important characteristics in a configuration tool, in descending order, were a robust feature set, reliability, performance, ability to integrate and remote capabilities. The survey also identified a long wish list of capabilities network managers would like to see in a configuration analysis tool, including: simplicity for use by lower-level personnel, support for all traffic types, less human factor interaction, lower cost and virtualization support.

The highest rated attributes — those deemed most important by survey respondents — coincidently had the largest gaps between their rated importance and rated current performance. For instance, the ability to provide non-intrusive, multilevel visualization for physical connectivity, IP subnets and routing ranked as the most important attribute, yet the gap between its ranking and its performance also was the biggest.

Respondents also would like to see configuration assurance solutions that automatically perform proactive assessments on a variety of network types, user-selected rule sets, a Web-based architecture that would support software-as-a-service, and an adaptive policy engine that uses “closed-loop” techniques for performing device corrections automatically without human intervention.

“We were surprised at the level of awareness about the need for configuration analysis,” Talpade said. “One company we spoke with accomplishes analysis by having a team of 50, but that’s an expense that can’t be taken on by everyone.”

The survey bolsters Telcordia’s decision to bring its IP Assure product to market. The product is designed to transform the costly, labor-intensive job of network error detection and remediation into an automated process while improving the security, regulatory compliance, and high availability of enterprise IP networks.

Telcordia’s IP Assure extracts detailed information from device configurations and inventory, which it uses to conduct a proactive assessment of network devices that takes the whole network into account and how that device relates to it. It also summarizes and reports visually on non-compliant rules and devices and provides non-intrusive visualization for physical connectivity, subnets and other configuration information.