The Tip of the Iceberg

Our case study subject company has had the Visual UpTime™ WAN Service Level Management System for four months, and the principle use of the product thus far has been to support daily operations. The company’s ops staff is only beginning to accumulate a long-term network performance database sufficient to provide a picture of how their FR WAN access lines are performing, and whether the information rate commitments are correctly sized.

We speculate that the Long Term Planning and Reporting toolset will prove as useful to the subject customer as the toolsets we have already described. Initial observations from the network performance database at hand suggest that the subject company has done a commendable job engineering and provisioning its WAN. Traffic utilization and throughput reports generated from the database confirm that the outbound flows from information distribution centers to brokerage locations are between 16-22 Kbps. The 32 Kbps CIR provisioned for all DDS links provides a conservative comfort zone.

Figure 13. Traffic Utilization report

We have already discussed the Burst Analysis report. Additional reports that we gleaned from the network performance database and feel are especially worthy of note include:

• Access Line Performance Reports can be used to identify DDS and T1 access lines that persistently experience failures. Tabular, histogram, or month-to-month graphs can be used to cross-correlate service failures with other events, or they can be used to determine if signal quality over a given facility is deteriorating.
• Link Layer Channel reports can be used to assess the busyness of an access channel, and to assess the occurrence of errors on an access channel.

Network administrators and NOC staff cannot afford to waste time poring over volumes of disaggregated network performance data. Many enterprises have developed custom solutions to aggregate, filter, and process performance data collected using commercial NMS’s. The most commonly sought-after network performance reports are readily available from the Long Term Planning and Reporting toolset. These built-in reporting features help increase productivity because skilled network staff can devote time to analyzing the consequences of network performance instead of developing tools to perform data aggregation.

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