How a Fortune 500 Financial Services Company Solved its MTU Issues with a Network Digital Twin

In the world of networking, misconfigurations and inconsistencies can lead to significant issues for businesses, especially those in highly regulated industries such as financial services. One Fortune 500 financial services company experienced a nightmare scenario with their MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) settings, resulting in application and performance problems. Fortunately, the company found a solution in Forward Networks' digital twin. This blog post will delve into the MTU issues faced by the company and how Forward Networks helped them overcome these challenges.

The MTU Nightmare:

The financial industry is known for its tight control over deployments and configurations. However, this also means that any misconfiguration or inconsistency can have severe consequences. The financial services company had been facing application issues and performance problems that had been occurring randomly, making it difficult to identify the root cause. Eventually, it was discovered that there was a misconfiguration in the MTU settings of a cross link between core devices. While jumbo frames were enabled north and south, this cross link was set to a lower MTU size of 1500. The issues became more apparent when the primary path failed, and traffic started traversing this misconfigured link. The network devices had to fragment the traffic, resulting in processing delays.

Before incorporating Forward Networks' digital twin technology, the company had programmers writing custom scripts to identify misconfigurations. These scripts were scattered across personal drives, making it challenging to consolidate and analyze the vast amounts of data they generated. The team became overwhelmed with Excel files containing close to a million lines, making the investigation process nearly impossible.

Recognizing the need for a more efficient and centralized approach to network analysis, the company turned to Forward Networks. The company saw promising results with Forward Networks' digital twin solution, which offered out-of-the-box capabilities to address their MTU issues. Forward Networks provided a pre-built script specifically designed to identify MTU misconfigurations, convincing the company of the platform's suitability for their needs.

Although the pre-written script provided by Forward Networks yielded results, the company still needed to narrow down the information it wanted to see. Despite not being a programmer, one of the company's network engineers was able to customize the script using educational resources provided by Forward Networks and the company’s user community. The engineer successfully created a tailored solution that only displayed infrastructure MTU information, filtering out unnecessary data.

By leveraging the capabilities of Forward Networks' network assurance and intent-based networking platform, this company saved a significant amount of time by automating the identification of MTU issues. Forward Networks enabled them to replace manual, fragmented scripts with a centralized solution, empowering their engineers to analyze network data more efficiently. In turn, they have minimized downtime and ensured that their network infrastructure is robust and reliable.