Troubleshooting WAN link delays

A fast growing financial institution in the USA has recently set–up 10 new branches across the country. All the branches are connected to a central datacenter in New York. Even a minute’s outage during the business hours will hugely cost the business. The network administrator deployed OpManager to monitor the critical WAN links to observe usage trends and performance.

One day in the early morning hours the network administrator receives an alert message in his smart phone about huge link latency between the New York Datacenter and the Austin branch. He immediately logs into OpManager and verifies the huge latency in the WAN RTT overview dashboard. Both the Business view map and Top path by RTT Threshold Violation indicate high delay in link performance.

He drills down to the hop–level graph using the Trace route functionality to identify the root cause of the issue. It shows a redirection in the communication path (carried out by the Service Provider) causing higher delay in traffic reaching the destination (Austin)

To know more details, he gets into the WAN Link snapshot page.

RTT Threshold Violation history and Round Trip Time History, show that the issue just started a few minutes back. He immediately verifies the Circuit ID and ISP’s telephone number from the router’s additional information page and logs a compliant with the ISP. The situation is restored subsequently.

A timely alert using the WAN RTT monitor add-on saved the financial institution from great business productivity loss.