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Junos Space Connectivity Services Director

designer to decide how the resources for the service should be

selected, whether the Connectivity Services directory uses an

automated service to pick resources, or whether an operator

should manually enter the values.

Connectivity Services Director comes with predefined service

definitions that capture Juniper best practices for standard

services in terms of the options selected, prefilled values for

attributes such as bandwidth, maximum transmission unit (MTU),

interface encapsulation, and more. Service providers can create

custom service definitions based on the service requirements.

Service Provisioning

Seventy-five percent of network outages are due to human error,

such as misconfigurations when changing an existing customer.

Imagine that you have to activate a 20-site VPLS for a customer.

Do you start a spreadsheet and keep track of the endpoints, PE

routers, interfaces, VLANs per interfaces, route targets, route

distinguishers, and other MPLS resources? To use this approach,

you would start by configuring the first site with great attention

to detail, update your spreadsheet or piece of paper, and slowly

make your way to the twentieth site by the end of the week.

Now, how do you know that the VPLS for the twentieth site is

working? You need to go site by site and verify that you have

reachability to all remote sites, issuing 20x19 pings.

What happens when you lose the spreadsheet that contains all

of the information for this customer VPN? What do you do if

you need to add a twenty-first site to this VPN and verify that

this new site is working with the 20 preceding sites?

Connectivity Services Director provides a simple GUI-based

provisioning tool that allows the operator to easily select the

endpoints for activating multisite services. It also provides

pre-validation before applying configuration to target devices,

verifying that there are no collisions with existing configurations

on the target devices and ensuring that a set of network

parameters ultimately works and renders the service functional.

Service Validation and Troubleshooting

Generating an accurate configuration and applying that

configuration is the first step in managing a service. However,

ensuring that the service is operational requires an additional

step that Connectivity Services Director provides. Verifying that

the control plane and data plane are functional guarantees that

the service is actually up and running.

The real value of Junos Space Connectivity Services Director

comes when the number of sites is large. The Functional Audit

feature verifies the service status both toward the core and

access side. On the core side, it does a control plane and data

plane validation across all sites in the service. On the access

side, it checks the interface status of all endpoints.

If one or more sites are not reachable, the operator is

immediately alerted to the broken sites with a detailed analysis

of the failure conditions. Predefined Stylesheet Language

Alternative Syntax (SLAX) scripts are available to help in

troubleshooting. Customized SLAX scripts can be associated

with services for additional troubleshooting.

Figure 4: Functional Audit—control plane and data plane validation

The ability to monitor status, traffic utilization, and SLA services

is important for any service provider. Connectivity Services

Director monitors all managed services, including:

• Service Summary: Provides overall status of the service

along with control plane status for each pair of devices

• Service Traffic: Provides interface traffic for all endpoints

that are part of the VPN service

• Service Transport: Provides the LSP associated between

provider edge devices being used by the VPN service

• Service Performance: Provides Y.1731 performance data

for E-Line and E-LAN services

Figure 5: Service monitoring