Troubleshooting Ports and Cross Connects

Maintenance activities

If you experience a drop or disconnect in service, check for scheduled or emergency maintenance. This is especially true if the issue occurs between 12:00 AM and 6:00 AM in the local timezone of the affected location.

Maintenance can cause the service to disconnect but typically takes only an hour or less to complete before the connection is restored.

For planned maintenance, advance notification is sent via email to your company’s technical contacts at least ten business days in advance. For information on receiving notifications, see Maintenance Notifications.

You can also view maintenance information in the portal on the Notifications page.

maintenance page

Gather port details

If you need to reach out to support, the process will be smoother and faster if you have gathered as much information as you can first.

From the PacketFabric portal

From the PacketFabric API

General troubleshooting steps

  • Check for maintenance activities (see the note above).

  • Check for any recent configuration or hardware changes on your on-prem equipment.

  • Check the transmit (TX) and receive (RX) light levels.

    It is important that you check the light levels of the PacketFabric port as well as your on-prem equipment.

    PacketFabric port:

    Light levels for the PacketFabric port can be viewed under the port details in the portal. Light levels that are too high or too low should result in a red or orange arrow in the portal. Healthy levels are green:

    light levels

    NOTE: Different optic types will have different minimum and maximum transmit and receive thresholds when verifying they are in spec. For a reference, see Optic Specifications.

    On-prem port:

    The command to check light levels on your specific hardware will vary. Common commands include:

    Cisco IOS-XR - show controller {{interface}}
    Juniper - show interfaces diagnostics optics {{interface}}

  • Execute the show interfaces command on your router or switch to check the following:

    • Interface status (up or down)
    • Protocol status
    • Utilization
    • Errors
    • MTU (All PacketFabric ports support a maximum MTU of 9000.)

  • Check the physical cables and connections.

    • Disconnect both ends of the fiber optic cable and shine a laser pointer or other light source through the cable to see if light comes out the other side. If you don’t see light, this indicates that the cable is likely broken and should be replaced.
    • Clean and reseat the fiber connectors/patch cables.
    • Try connecting to different physical ports.
    • Visually inspect the cable. Check for bends, twists, and crimps.

  • Add a loopback interface to the port to verify the connection and look for incrementing errors.

  • Try toggling autonegotiation off and on.

    TIP: For 1 Gbps connections, you can toggle autonegotiation by editing the port.

Issue type

If network monitoring shows a disconnection or drop in performance on your PacketFabric service, follow the instructions below to troubleshoot the issue.

Operational status is “Down”

Degraded service or latency

Light Levels

Network flaps/unstable connections

Updated on 30 Nov 2022