MPLS WAN Explorer officials arebilling the product as the first to deliver end-to-end network visibility across outsourced Layer-3 (L3) MPLS VPNs, “helping enterprises ensure the availability, performance, and security of their wide area network (WAN), while keeping service providers accountable.” 

MPLS WAN Explorer uses Packet Design’s (News - Alert) route analytics technology to provide “an unprecedented view beyond the traditional boundaries of enterprise networks,” company officials say, “encompassing both IP routing within the enterprise, as well as site-to-site reachability across the L3 MPLS VPN service.”

MPLS WAN Explorer is intended to fill what company officials see as ‘an important gap in enterprise WAN management,” by reducing network operations and engineering costs, while helping IT departments achieve their service quality goals.

It’s engineered to help create a baseline of site-to-site reachability specifying prefixes to be exchanged between sites, and monitors active prefixes and alerts on any deviations from baseline to identify reachability problems.

MPLS WAN Explorer also generates an always up to date, accurate map of WAN routing architecture to understand and monitor VPN policy and status, and is not dependent on multi-minute SNMP polling cycles, helping IT respond faster to emerging issues.

The product is also being marketed as a way to improve service provider accountability, as it helps diagnose when the service provider is responsible for WAN outages and ensures Enterprise IT “receives the service quality they're paying for,” company officials say.

It also simulates changes in routing or traffic for failure analysis or when planning network changes and helps engineers understand the impact of adding new sites or deploying new applications before making changes. It has a highly scalable architecture, company officials say, adding that a single MPLS WAN Explorer appliance “can manage an entire enterprise network, including multiple L3 MPLS VPNs from multiple Service Providers.”