Hi ,
I've had the following problem with a customer of ours and I'd like to know if there's any tools I can use in the future to better diagnose the problem if it may arise again.
The customer is a bank with hundreds of brnach sites. All of them are connected to the corporate via a MPLS network managed by a local TELCO company .
In the last ten days they have experienced long delays during logons of users in the branch sites . This delay has been initially thought due to new operating systems deployed on the clients ( XP ) . In fact there's a rollout of XP computers at all the branch sites .
Trying to troubleshoot the problem we have started looking at all OS related known problems but found nothing important.
Next I tried looking at the network connections with the few tools I have ( basically ping , traceroute and protocol analyzer ) but all seemed ok .
Having no access to the telco routers I monitored the corporate's switch ports to which the two telco router are attched .
Finally I found some packet discarded and could call the telco and having the routers checked.
They found a problem , they didn't told us what it was , and suddendly most of the problems were gone.
This was really tricky because a part from the slow logon we had no other mulfunctions . I found the problem thanks to a Microsoft tool to check group policy problem which point me to possible networks problem.
The question , after this long post , is ; is there any tool, agent , software I can install or use to check MPLS network efficiency having no access to the TELCO routers ?
Thanks in advance