At Packet Design, our product suite is as essential to our customers as everyday Web apps are to consumers. The people responsible for managing the largest, most complex networks in the world depend on our Explorer Suite to ensure that critical services are delivered optimally and reliably. For example, just as people use Google Maps for getting the safest and shortest travel routes, our customers use Packet Design to get a real-time picture of existing routes, analyze them, and find the safest and shortest routes on the network map.
To keep on the cutting edge of network service assurance, we’ve moved our product suite to a Web-based version for three specific reasons:
- With the ever-growing demands on Internet connectivity, understanding how service traffic traverses complex networks is becoming increasingly important and needs to be managed carefully. More constituents – including operations and management in addition to engineers, planners and architects – need access to Packet Design information in ways they understand.
- As we expand our product portfolio, we need to unite all functionality and correlate disparate data in an elegant, workflow-based UI. A good example is the addition of Performance Explorer to our Explorer Suite, which we announced last week. As latency and device metrics are correlated with path and traffic flow data, our UI will help end users understand how routing behavior affects network service delivery and where to take action.
- To deliver an SDN management platform, we had to separate the presentation and application layers. We did this by introducing a RESTful API layer that the new Web UI uses to access back-end product services. This API will be published to provide third party access to our platform’s analytics and orchestration services, including the interface to SDN controllers. Stay tuned for more on this later in the year.

Performance Explorer Operations Topology Map
The product suite has an effective and responsive UI design and is extremely user-friendly. This not only helps our expert customers have a better experience, but it also enables new users who have little networking knowledge to glean what they need from our products quickly and easily.
All the product components – including the Dashboard, Topology Maps, and Reports – are being moved to the Web. The “Map on Web” feature, for instance, is similar to looking at a Google Map, with an always-current, web-based routing topology map. In short, Packet Design is getting Webonised!
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