The router in your network maybe just a device that links you to the Internet but its failure could bring about consequences for the entire network.
On 8 July, United grounded its flights for about 90 minutes after a faulty router prevented the US airline from checking in passengers and printing boarding passes and luggage tags.
One solution to prevent this from happening again is to have redundant routers and cables, but Network World spoke to experts and shared that “networking problems are rarely as simple as routing around a failure.”
Wrote Network World,
“So a router failure could mean a lot of things other than total shutdown. Often, it means a software glitch or a clumsy engineer’s configuration mistake that can spread to other routers or affect their performance. The router may have malfunctioned, but the rest of the network doesn’t know it, said Dell’Oro Group analyst Alam Tamboli. United hasn’t shared more details of its latest problem.Active monitoring of the health status of the router and alerts to IT team of router issues could provide IT teams with more insights and time to address issues occuring from a failed router.Router software upgrades are a frequent cause of widespread network breakdowns that lead to embarrassing headlines. In fact, updating network software can be such an ordeal that some enterprises keep running the same versions for years, choosing to manage the risk of security holes rather than take on the dangers of an upgrade, Skorupa said.”
NetGain Enterprise Manager Topology and Business View features also allows IT team to have quick insights to how a failed router could affect other routers and other network devices linked to it.
IT teams can also be alerted to software upgrades done in the router and track changes accordingly.
