A route change, by itself, isn't necessarily bad.

*MANY* service providers use load balancing and a route will oscillate between two or three routers at the same load-balanced hop. This is not a bad thing, and shouldn't have any affect on the end user experience.

There *can* be interesting relationships between packet loss or latency and route changes, however.

One of the valuable things that the route change information in PingPlotter can tell you is when a route change occurs that causes or fixes packet loss or latency issues. This type of situation might show deteriorating conditions (more packet loss, more latency), and then it suddenly clears up. If you look at the route change history in PingPlotter, you'll see a route change right when things cleared up - someone or something saw that some router was causing problems, and routed data around that router. This is a good thing.

The thing you always want to look for is packet loss or latency at the final hop. If the final hop is showing consistent latency and no packet loss, the route changes you're seeing are probably ensuring that the network stays as a well performing network. Unless you're seeing big latency variances or packet loss, this is almost certainly not going to cause problems with your Citrix connections.

Most often, a route with an oscillating router like you're probably seeing (a single hop that is shifting between multiple routers) can be safely ignored with a route change mask, which then highlights the route changes that make a real difference. If you're getting 1300 in 5 hours, then these route changes have reached the level of "noise", so you should almost certainly mask the particular oscillating router. Note that this only excludes that specific oscillation - and if a new router is introduced, you'll still be notified of that via the route change panel. The easiest way to create this mask is by right-clicking on the hop in the upper graph and using the add route change mask option there.

Some discussion of the importance of starting your troubleshooting efforts by reviewing the final destination are discussed in our knowledgebase: http://www.nessoft.com/kb/24

This is a great discussion topic - thanks for asking this question. Please feel free to continue the discussion if you think the route oscillation is causing packet loss or latency variances, or if you still think that the route changes are impacting the end user experience. We'll be happy to do what we can to help.