What's new in the Partner Portal

 

This article provides a list of new, enhanced, and changed features in the Partner Portal.

 

September 2024

• You can now run network diagnostic tools (ping/traceroute/mtr/dig) from within the Partner Portal to help diagnose and troubleshoot OCA connectivity issues. For more information, see: Running network utilities (ping and traceroute commands) on an OCA
• The Operational Issues pages now show both Open / Active alerts and issues that have Resolved within the previous 30 days. This enhancement allows you to see a recent history of issues to help with troubleshooting and reporting. For more information, see: Viewing and managing operational issues in the Partner Portal
• The Route Performance Report has been enhanced again to allow you to independently include or exclude Private and Public IPv4 prefixes from the report. See below, or Viewing BGP route performance metrics for more information.

August 2024

The Route Performance Report has been enhanced:

• There are new options available that you can use to modify the results that are returned from the report. You can limit the results to a single ASN and include or exclude IPv6 prefixes from the results.
• If you are using a "CGNAT Bypass" configuration, the report now includes data for private IPv4 prefixes. You can choose to include or exclude public IPv4 prefixes from the report.
• Very large subnets with short prefix lengths are now broken into smaller chunks, to provide more granular visibility into different parts of your network. Because of this change, it may not be possible to exactly compare previous results (downloaded before this change was made) with current results.
  • For IPv4 subnets with prefix lengths less than /16, we force the prefix length to /16
  • For IPv6 subnets with prefix lengths less than /20, we force the prefix length to /20

 

For more information see:

• • Viewing BGP route performance metrics
  • Are OCAs compatible with CGNAT (Carrier Grade NAT)?

June 2024

The Partner Portal home page has been enhanced to provide better visibility into the statuses of each OCA in each site. You can use the home page and the filter buttons above the Embedded Sites grid to discover OCAs in your network that are flagged for RMA, offline for unknown reasons, or pending installation. For more information, see: Summary of the embedded OCA deployment workflow

May 2024

There is a new menu on the OCA console that allows you to run ping and traceroute commands from the OCA. For more information, see: Running ping and traceroute commands from the console on an OCA

February - March 2024

As a follow-on to the operational issues changes mentioned in November 2023, we have implemented the following changes to our outreach communication:

• We no longer open individual tickets for non-Urgent operational issues that are not currently impacting service or preventing an OCA from serving traffic. For example: IPv6 BGP down, data reporting issues, input errors, missing tier fill, and so on. 
• We will continue to open individual tickets for issues that are service-impacting or preventing an OCA from serving traffic. For example: OCAs offline, IPv4 BGP down.
• Most pre-existing outreach tickets for non-urgent operational issues have now been closed, unless we are actively communicating with you in the ticket.
• As mentioned below, all active issues (both urgent and non-urgent) are summarized in a weekly email to your NOC contacts and visible in the Partner Portal.

The goals of these changes are to reduce the overall volume of our individual outreach communications, more clearly summarize any issues we are detecting at a site and OCA level, and emphasize priority so that you can focus your attention on service-impacting issues.

As always, if you need assistance with active operational issues or anything else, please open a ticket, we are here to help.

For more information see:

• Viewing and managing active operational issues in the Partner Portal 
• OCA Live checks

November 2023

• Operational issues that are detected by our monitoring system are now surfaced and summarized in the Partner Portal. We have also started sending weekly email reports to NOC contacts that will summarize any active issues. For more information see:
  • Viewing and managing active operational issues in the Partner Portal 
  • OCA Live checks

April 2023

• There is a new Tier Fill report in the Route Explorer. This report allows you to identify situations where OCAs in one or more of your embedded sites are not enabled to obtain nightly fill from OCAs in one or more of your other embedded sites. For more information, see this article: Exploring BGP route announcements to embedded OCAs

February 2023

• There is a new Discover Unregistered (RIR) Routes report in the Route Optimizer that allows you to discover unregistered routes that appear to be advertised or propagated beyond their intended scope. For more details, see this article: Troubleshooting BGP route announcements using Route Optimizer reports
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December 2022

• You can now modify or remove the IPv6 network configuration of an OCA remotely, by using the Partner Portal. IPv4 configuration changes still require physical access to the OCA. For more details, see this article: Updating the network configuration on an OCA
• The new Traffic by Source graph on the Partner Portal homepage shows overall traffic for the last week, broken down by traffic source. This provides a more holistic view of Netflix traffic patterns and volume across all sources, augmenting the Traffic by Site graph which is limited to embedded sources. For more detail, you can link from this graph to the existing Traffic by AS Path report.

  

• On the Maintenance page for each site or OCA, you can now specify additional durations when you are disabling OCAs for maintenance, from a minimum of 3 hours to a maximum of 30 days. Previously, you could only specify durations of either 24 or 48 hours. As before, you can still manually end or extend the maintenance window if needed.

  

September 2022

• During the burn-in process of OCA deployment, the status of any failing turn-up checks are displayed on the Overview page for the OCA. There is also a new help center article that describes each turn-up check and how to troubleshoot and fix issues.

May 2022

• The home page and main menu for the Partner Portal has changed. The new home page shows a summary of sites and OCAs for your organization, plus embedded site and PNI capacity and utilization. You can navigate to organization-level details from the main menu, which is now always visible at the top of the page. You can also see open tickets or in-progress OCA deployments from the main page. For more information, see the Getting Started with Partner Portal article, or the other articles in this section.

November 2021

• The Route Optimizer has been enhanced with a new troubleshooting report that allows you to discover routes that are advertised to your embedded OCAs, with no alternate IX or Other traffic source. This situation can cause streaming errors if a client IP within the prefix requests content that is not stored within your embedded site.

August 2021

• There are two new reports on the main Metrics > Reports tab:
  • • PNI Capacity (1 week) and PNI Capacity (Historical): Use these reports to look at serving capacity and traffic levels for each site where you have established private network interconnections (PNI) with Netflix.
    • These reports are only visible if you have PNI established with Netflix.

April 2021

• The Route Optimizer tool has been enhanced:
  • There is a new report option (Show only routes with traffic) that allows you to filter out routes with no traffic from the results 
  • Traffic levels are now visible for each prefix in the results grid, and the results are sorted by traffic level
  • More details about the Route Optimizer in this article

November 2020

• There are three new reports on the main Metrics > Reports tab:
  • • Site Capacity (1 week) and Site Capacity (Historical): Use these reports to look at serving capacity and traffic levels for each of your embedded sites.
    • Route Performance: Use this report to help identify client prefixes (CIDRs) in your network that might be experiencing less than optimal Netflix video streaming quality.
• There is a new Maintenance tab at the organization level that summarizes any future maintenance events that have been scheduled.

October 2020

• There are some efficiency enhancements in progress that impact fill patterns. For more information, see: Media-aware content placement. Update: This effort is now complete.

July 2020

• There is a new deployment tracking diagram that displays the status of OCAs from when they are being prepared for shipment to when they are set to serve live traffic. For more information, see: Summary of the embedded OCA deployment workflow
• OCAs that are under RMA now display a flag that describes the reason for the RMA, and links to the replacement OCA when it is in transit. 

     

• Open and completed forms are now accessible from new site and OCA level Forms tabs.

  

May 2020

• The Route Optimizer has been enhanced with some new features:
  • Values in the results that are causing routes to be preferred by the "typically less-optimal" traffic source are now circled in red. For example: If the MED value being advertised to embedded OCAs is higher than the MED value that is being advertised to PNI, the MED values are circled. The goal is to help you determine a potential fix for the situation, however the actual fix that makes sense for your particular network environment might be different.
  • "Other" prefixes that appear in the results grid multiple times (with AS Path, MED, and site masked out) are now collapsed into one row. A count next to each row shows how many similar routes exist.
• Two new metrics graphs have been added to the Appliance Details page, so that you can view metrics about OCA connectivity. For more information, see: Viewing connectivity metrics for an OCA

Feb 2020

• Beginning on February 24, Netflix implemented RPKI filtering on BGP sessions to embedded Open Connect Appliances (OCAs). This change should have no impact in most cases. For more information, see: RPKI-based route filtering
• Beginning on February 25, Netflix implemented multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Partner Portal accounts. For more information, see: Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Jan 2020

• Route Optimizer: You can now run reports to discover potential opportunities to optimize your BGP route announcements across peering and embedded sites. For more information, see: Troubleshooting BGP route announcements using Route Optimizer reports
• Enhancements to and renaming of the BGP Explorer: The BGP Explorer has been renamed Route Explorer. This feature has been enhanced to allow you to filter the results so that only inconsistent announcements within each embedded site are shown. For more information, see: Exploring BGP route announcements to embedded OCAs

Oct 2019

• Audit Logs: You can now view a history of changes made by users in your organization. For more details, see: Viewing audit logs for your organization 
• Shipping addresses: You can now view and modify the shipping addresses that are associated with each site. For more details, see: Viewing and editing shipping addresses for a site
• "Traffic by AS Path" report enhancements: The "Traffic by AS Path" report on the Reports tab has been enhanced with the following new features:
  • The report now differentiates between private ("Netflix Direct") and public ("Netflix via IXP") peering traffic
  • In addition to traffic percentages, you can now also see approximate Peak Gbps values for each row
  • Site and country labels are added for peering sites
  • A site city label is added for embedded sites
  • For more information see: Viewing high level traffic patterns in the Traffic by AS Path report

Sept 2019

• Viewing emails: You can now view bulk emails in the portal that have been sent by Netflix to contacts in your organization. For more details see: Viewing email communication in the portal

July 2019

• Scheduling Maintenance: Support has been added to allow you to schedule a future maintenance window for appliances, up to 3 months in advance. This feature also sends a notification to Netflix that replaces the "Partner Maintenance" ticket type. For more details, see: Disabling appliances for maintenance

May 2019

• Additional detail has been added to the Overview diagram for OCAs. You can now see:
  • Labels for connected vs. unconnected ports
  • Real-time light levels
  • PSU status

For more information, see the Getting Started article.

April 2019

• Partner Forms and Partner Portal integration: There is a new Forms tab at the organization level that shows a list of all forms for your organization. Open forms, which require input, are highlighted. From the Forms tab, click on a form name to navigate to the Partner Forms application. If you have Partner Portal credentials, use SSO to access the Partner Forms application, so that you can see every form in your organization - regardless of state - and you can collaborate on all open forms.
• Note: Forms collaborators without Partner Portal credentials can continue to access the Partner Forms application by using the temporary URL and code that is sent out with our email notifications. For more information, see the updated Getting Started with Partner Forms article.

February 2019

• Portal permissions levels: Partner Portal user authentication has been enhanced to enable portal users with more limited permission levels. This feature can be used to invite read-only contacts to the portal, so that they can view the information in the portal but cannot make changes to OCAs or do user management tasks. For more detailed information see the related article.

January 2019

• Spec sheet links: On the Overview tab for each OCA, there is a new link to the spec sheet (if available) for that version of OCA. Most OCAs have spec sheets available but some earlier versions do not.
• Email notification changes: Email notices for partner-initiated OCA or site maintenance are now only sent out to portal users with the "NOC" role. Previously, all portal users were receiving these notifications.

November 2018

• New view of sites and appliances: The Sites tab at the organization level has been updated for better usability. In the new grid:
  • View information about all appliances in your organization at a glance, without needing to drill down to individual sites.
  • Use the new search field to quickly filter the list by name, IP address, or contact name.
  • Download the site and appliance information in the grid to a CSV file for offline reporting.

September 2018

• New "Traffic by AS Path" report: There is a new Reports tab at the organization level. This tab contains a new report showing two views of the breakdown of your Netflix traffic. Use these views to help identify suboptimal routing of your Netflix traffic. On the Reports tab, select Traffic by AS Path and select a date. You will see two charts:
  • A detailed breakdown showing daily traffic grouped by source, including AS Path
  • A long term view of the overall traffic breakdown

  

• User interface changes: The left menu bar has been removed to allow more space on the screen for the display of information and charts. All menu items are now available at the top of the application. For more details including screen caps, see the Getting Started article.

August 2018

• BGP session configuration changes: The BGP session configuration diagram has been enhanced so that you can now create and configure a new IPv6 BGP session. Previously, you could only edit an existing session. For more details on how to enable IPv6, see this article.

July 2018

• New OCA-level metrics: There is a new Metrics tab at the Appliance details level. This tab contains three new or enhanced metrics:
  • A longer-range historical version of the 24H throughput chart
  • Interface input errors
  • Interface light levels (optical strength)

• New metrics time zone switcher: There is a new control on all of the Metrics pages that allows you to switch between UTC and local time zones.

 

• Ticketing updates:
  • When you are creating a ticket, the ticket dialog automatically provides links to any relevant Zendesk articles in the Partner Portal help center. This feature alerts you to written instructions that might help solve your issue.
  • There is a new badge on the main Tickets menu icon that indicates the number of open tickets for your organization.

 

June 19, 2018

New portal: Partner Portal is re-released.

We rebuilt the Partner Portal application from top to bottom with these main goals:

• More intuitive self-service, with the ability to determine at a glance which sites and appliances require your attention
• Better performance for large organizations
• Better usability, with simpler navigation and quicker access to available actions on sites or appliances (for example, disabling for maintenance)

All of the useful features of the old portal still exist in the new format, such as access to org/site/appliance metrics and integrated Zendesk ticketing.

The new portal is at the same URL: https://my.oc.netflix.com

Use your existing user ID and password to access the new portal.

For more information about how to use the new portal, see the Getting Started articles in our Zendesk help center.

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