Byte25 Event Driven Monitoring
Using Byte25 to Identify and Alert on MPLS Circuit Flapping in Cisco EIGRP Networks in Real-Time …
Intermittent instability (or “flapping”) on MPLS circuits is one of the most difficult network issues to diagnose. A circuit may repeatedly lose and re-establish connectivity within seconds, causing application interruptions, routing reconvergence, and degraded user experience.
In Cisco MPLS environments using EIGRP, the physical interface often remains operational while the routing adjacency is lost. As a result, traditional SNMP polling may fail to detect the event because the interface never transitions to a down state. Even when interface failures do occur, periodic polling (for example, every 1–5 minutes) can easily miss short-duration outages.
A real-time, event-driven monitoring solution is therefore required.
A Quick Look at the Byte25 Solution …
Rather than rely on polling techniques, Byte25 deploys a real-time event driven solution relying on SNMP traps sent directly from the Cisco routers. This ensures that all link flaps are identified irrespective of time intervals in which they occur.
SNMP traps from multiple Cisco routes in the network are sent directly to a Byte25 Appliance which performs correlation before forwarding to the Byte5 Cloud server in real time. Once received by the Byte25 cloud server, additional alerting activity can be triggered such as ending an email, Teams or Slack notification or Webhook to interface with existing help desk solution.
Enable SNMP traps on Cisco routers to report both physical interface changes and EIGRP neighbour state changes. These traps are generated immediately by the router, allowing a monitoring platform to detect network instability in real time without relying on frequent polling.
The recommended Cisco configuration is:
snmp-server enable traps link snmp-server enable traps eigrp snmp-server host <Byte25 Appliance IP> version 2c <community>
Two categories of events are monitored:
Interface Link Traps
- Link Down
- Link Up
These events indicate physical circuit failures or interface transitions.
EIGRP Neighbour Traps
- Neighbour Up
- Neighbour Down
These events indicate routing adjacency loss or restoration, even when the physical interface remains operational.
Benefits
- Immediate notification of circuit failures and routing instability
- Detects logical routing failures that interface polling cannot identify
- Minimal bandwidth and CPU overhead compared with high-frequency polling
- Eliminates missed outages caused by polling intervals
- Provides structured event data that is easy to process and correlate
- Enables automatic identification of unstable MPLS links before they become prolonged service outages
Summary
Using Cisco SNMP Link and EIGRP traps provides a lightweight, event-driven mechanism for detecting MPLS circuit instability in real time. By correlating interface and routing neighbour events, Byte25 can accurately identify flapping circuits, reduce mean time to detection (MTTD), and provide immediate operational visibility into intermittent MPLS network issues.
For more information or to schedule a demonstration or trial of the Byte25 functionality,
please contact Byte25 directly at info@byte25.com