9.11 Service-Level Management

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Some products offer service-level management capabilities that, among other things, collect data concerning WAN usage, especially in frame relay environments. These CSU-DSUs collect and display data gathered from onboard probes and provide historical and real-time circuit analysis. The data is collected at the CSU-DSU and may be brought into an enterprise network management system or offered as a service by the carrier. The advantage of having service-level management capabilities in the CSU-DSUs is that they can monitor both the router’s serial interface and the WAN T1/DDS circuit. As a result, they provide more information than single-interface probe devices.

Products such as Visual Networks’ Visual UpTime offer service-level agreement (SLA) validation with detailed service-level reports, which provide insight into variations of SLA parameters over time. This helps enterprise users resolve how and where SLA violations occurred during the previous day, week, or month. The detail level reports can be created either as a daily, monthly, or multimonth report on a per-PVC basis. The summary reports can be created as a monthly, multimonth, and month-to-month report for all PVCs (aggregate).

Among the SLA drill-down reports offered by Visual UpTime is one for frame relay service-level validation (see Figure 9.7), which provides availability, delay, and throughput information that describes the performance of each PVC.

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Figure 9.7: Frame relay service-level validation from Visual Networks’ Visual UpTime.

Frame relay service providers can use management tools like Visual UpTime to offer the following tiered services to their customers:

  • CSU-DSU provisioning and maintenance, allowing end-to-end monitoring 24 hours a day, 7 days a week;

  • Network planning and performance reporting, which adds network performance reports for help with bandwidth and capacity planning;

  • Troubleshooting and real-time support, delivering to customers the same real-time access to network performance information, collected by the CSU-DSU, as the carrier’s own maintenance technicians.

Customers get wide-area data access and in-depth monitoring and analysis of critical metrics regarding their network performance. The embedding of such monitoring and analysis functions into the CSU-DSU improves end-to-end network service quality by minimizing network downtime and performance degradation. This functionality includes real-time and historical troubleshooting, network baselining, and detailed reporting for use in bandwidth planning.

Baselining is a procedure for understanding the behavior of a properly functioning-network so that deviations can help identify the cause of problems that may occur in the future. The only way to know a network’s normal behavior is to analyze it while it is operating properly. Later, technicians and network managers can compare data from the properly functioning network with data gathered after conditions have begun to deteriorate. This comparison often points to the right steps that lead to a corrective solution.



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LANs to WANs(c) The Complete Management Guide
LANs to WANs: The Complete Management Guide
ISBN: 1580535720
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 184

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