Henry Ford once said, “Don’t find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.”
The question to ask yourself is whether your existing network management solutions are complainers? In other words, do they just state the problems they find, or are they actually helping you to find a remedy to the many problems that arise in operational networks?
Perhaps we should take a step back and consider what the most common network management problems are first. Can you list the problems with your current OSS? Do they contain any of the following:
- You find it difficult to maintain the quality of the data in your inventory solution, particularly passive elements like cables, racks and ducts. Being passive, you can’t poll these objects for their current status. You know that data quality problems result in additional costs caused by re-designs, additional truck-rolls and more. Poor data quality also impedes the users’ confidence in your solutions, no matter how good they actually are. However, you don’t have mechanisms to easily identify the source of the problems in your data
- Your actions are closely measured against contractual objectives like SLAs. Yet, because you store large amounts of network data, there are delays in the precious SLA-count-down time when you attempt complex data queries, especially network traces, service impact or root-cause analyses (SIA / RCA)
- Your network has an increased level of virtualisation these days, making resource allocation more dynamic. However, you only “discover” the network once every 24 hours. This isn’t often enough to really know what’s available in the network
- Due to the nature of modern packet-switched networks, you don’t have suitable visibility into where traffic is flowing or how the network is currently configured
- Therefore, it can be challenging to know exactly which customers are impacted when problems arise on the network, or exactly how their services are impacted
- Vendors are regularly introducing new network equipment types, not to mention cards and configurations. It can be really challenging to introduce corresponding changes into your solutions. They need to be customised, which takes weeks or months each time rather than being easily re-configured by your own team
- Similarly, your current solutions are very regimented and must be configured to follow specific rules. This doesn’t give you the flexibility to model your network the way you would like to
- When problems arise in the network, the most obvious question to ask is how was it configured before the failure and what has changed since. However, your solution is designed to only show the current state and struggles to give a perspective of any state changes that may have influenced the fault
- Your solutions must support end-to-end workflows in large volumes but they appear to have been designed for doing individual tasks, one-by-one rather than at scale
Solutions for network management problems
The SunVizion OSS tools have been developed with a problem-solver’s mindset, not a complainer’s. They help in ways such as:
- Providing cross-checks, enforced naming conventions, supporting data confidence indicators and other data quality reinforcement techniques
- Leverage advanced data management technologies such as a graph database to ensure rapid query times even on large data sets
- Our flexible data model allows for virtualised networks to be modelled and reconciled with
- Our Network Inventory tracks working and protect paths, VLANs, LSPs and other topologies, which allows current utilisation metrics (from external sources) to be associated with underlying infrastructure
- Customers and services can also be associated with infrastructure for SIA and RCA impacts
- The flexible data model allows for self-served changes to be made in minutes rather than requiring call-backs to vendors / integrators
- The object-oriented data model allows you to build a model and object hierarchy that best suits your needs rather than having to constrain yourself into a fixed model
- All Network device Configuration changes are logged to accurately identify when every change occurred
- Our user interfaces and automations including Network Planning and Network Roll-out Management are designed with scale in mind
These are just some of the many problem scenarios that our OSS finds remedies for. But are they the most important ones in your list of problems? Reach out to us to see how we can help remedy your problems, not just find faults to complain about.