Essential Tools for Good Network Management

21/07/2022

Essential Tools for Good Network Management

Author: Eduardo Barasal Morales – Coordinator of the autonomous systems training area at CEPTRO.br/NIC.br

Maintaining an operational and stable network is essential for maintaining the services that use it. This means that network administrators need to permanently monitor and pay attention to the proper performance of their network, mainly because changes in communications occur naturally on the Internet. One minute everything is stable, and packets are following the correct path; the next, a simple change in route propagation occurs and packets start following other paths. Sometimes these changes have no impact, but in other cases they can be very harmful to the institutions that manage their networks.

Knowing these tools and how to use them is of great help for the daily work of network administrators and the proper operation of their networks. There are many tools available on the market, many of which are free and open source. They allow a better understanding of how each network is part of the Internet (interactions between the different Autonomous Systems), checking which networks are connected to a given Internet Exchange Point (IXP), examining how their BGP announcements are reaching the Internet, detecting potential IP address hijacks that may be happening at a given moment, analyzing delays in network communication, and inferring additional insights.

This article will present a small set of simple, free, and often unknown tools that are available to help network administrators solve and identify some of the most common communication problems in their networks.

To do so, we will show some problem situations and then exemplify how these tools can help.

Problem Caused by Third Parties

Network administrators often encounter problems on their networks that are caused by third parties. Sometimes these are intentional, such as a denial-of-service attack which floods the targeted links and overloads the systems, or a prefix hijack that causes the loss of communication (Figure 1).

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 Figure 1: Prefix hijack causing the theft of traffic

Other times, they are caused by configuration errors, such as a route leak that routes packets through unintended paths and can slow down communication (Figure 2).

 Figure 2: Route leak causing a change in communication paths

Identifying these problems is not an easy task for network administrators, especially as they are often external and typically last for a short time. This is why external tools that store information over time help network administrators understand and provide data so they can contact the third parties involved and solve the problems.

Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit – https://bgp.he.net/

The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of LACNIC.

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