Traffic Matrix Workflow

The Traffic Matrix capability in Planner enables you to create a detailed traffic matrix by capturing real-time telemetry data from your production network. Routing Director utilizes this real-time telemetry data from your network and provides a detailed view of traffic patterns across multiple routing scenarios. Understanding these metrics allows you to simulate traffic scenarios and predict how changes will impact network performance.

Routing Director allows you to gather link utilization metrics while importing a production network. Routing Director later uses this data to measure the volume of data transmitted over time and compares it to the maximum capacity of the interface. This offers insights into hourly and daily traffic patterns and facilitates further analysis.

Similarly, Routing Director allows you to gather tunnel-related metrics while importing a production network. Routing Director later uses this data to analyze traffic distribution and efficiency.

The traffic matrix provides the data necessary to compute how much of a network's capacity is being used. It is essential for network planning and optimization, providing insights into capacity planning, trend analysis, and path optimization. By utilizing inputs such as topology models and interface traffic statistics, you can generate realistic traffic matrices, which is crucial for preparing for future network loads. It also facilitates trend analysis through historical traffic data, allowing you to identify patterns and predict future network behavior.

Note: This feature supports tunnels with only the following provision methods: Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR-TE) and Resource Reservation Protocol- Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE).

To generate and utilize traffic matrix:

Note: This workflow is not applicable if you import a network model by uploading a file in JSON or .gz format.

Import a live network with data. For more information, see Create a Network Model.

Note: If you want to edit the already-imported network model to modify the existing statistics generation, then select the network model and click the edit icon (pencil). Select the Traffic/Demand Generation option and make the necessary changes.
Load the statistics file.
On the Working Model page, select the model that you imported and click More > View Stats. The View Stage page appears.
Select the statistics file that you want to load and click Load Traffic/Build Demand.
(Optional) Manage the statistics file. You can view the list of statistic files and its details in the table, export, or delete the statistics file. For more information, see About the View Stats Page.

After you load a statistic file, Routing director uses the link utilization and tunnel-related data from the production network that you have imported and analyze traffic distribution and efficiency. You can view the following on your offline network:

View link utilization data in the network information table of the Link tab (Planning > Networks > Offline Models > Model-Name > Open). For more information see, About the Link Tab (Planner).
View tunnel traffic on the Tunnel tab (Planning > Networks > Offline Models > Model-Name > Open). For more information see, About the Tunnel Tab (Planner).

Note: You can only view the last 30 days of traffic data as the retention period is 30 days (by default).