Introduction
Scope and Purpose
Visual UpTime™
Components
Case Study
Sectionalization
Troubleshooting
Traffic Analysis
Congestion
Delay Analysis
Tip Of The Iceberg
Conclusion
Contact Visual Networks

Visual UpTime™:
A Core Competence Product Evaluation
The Visual UpTime™ WAN Service Level Management System

Enterprise network management of WAN services such as Frame Relay is typically performed from a central, commercial SNMP network management system (NMS). By polling software agents in network elements, including routers, FRAD’s, and certain WAN DSU/CSU equipment, enterprise network administrators hope to obtain status and performance information necessary to determine whether their WAN services are operational and performing as anticipated.

Figure 1. Conventional Network Management using SNMP

There are several problems with this approach:

  1. Scalability - The use of polling to monitor the operational status of large numbers of WAN circuits has proven to be difficult to manage, so administrators have turned to alarm (trap) processing. Generic SNMP traps, however, offer too little information to be useful for monitoring service levels. Conventional SNMP agents are rarely equipped to monitor and analyze performance and transient error conditions before they issue alarm messages.
  2. Integration - Commercial NMS’s require considerable customization and all too frequent polling to collect information from the various network elements needed to analyze WAN performance. Even when carefully managed, traffic associated with collection of this performance data can impose a constant, onerous load on a network. This is especially undesirable for WAN services where subscribers pay based on use or information rate commitments.
  3. Visibility - Commercial NMS’s cannot collect sufficient data from conventional SNMP agents to perform centralized real-time analysis of WAN circuit traffic. Network administrators must capture and analyze traffic on LANs adjacent to WAN circuits to identify higher level protocol problems. "Sniffing" at a LAN interface does not always provide enough information to solve a WAN problem, and requires that expert staff be present at the site experiencing the problem.
  4. Network administrators need proactive and real-time tools to deal with these problems. They need tools that provide immediate notification of service failures, tools that accurately identify the causes of service failures. They need tools that constantly monitor service levels, maintain detailed performance data for all WAN circuits, and provide readily accessible analysis and reports to corroborate or refute claims that service level commitments are being met. This is the essence of WAN service level management.

The Visual UpTime™ WAN Service Level Management system complements existing network elements, SNMP agents, and network management systems to support WAN service level management, as follows:

  • At each access line in a Frame Relay WAN, an intelligent agent called an Analysis Service Element (ASE) gathers WAN service status and statistical information.
  • Data are gathered from all the ASE’s via standard SNMP and bulk file transfer protocols to form a highly detailed and long-term network performance database.
  • Toolsets accessed through a MIC or PAM console application provide the ability to examine and manipulate the network performance database.

Figure 2. WAN Service Level Management using Visual UpTime™

next...