Client: Regional Telecommunications Company
Client Challenge
As a regional telecommunications company providing local and long distance phone service, business network services, and DSL internet access, this client’s network comprised tens of thousands of infrastructure elements. With this massive infrastructure, providing service assurance to its customers required advanced technology to manage the availability and performance of these services.
Adding to the complexity, this company began an initiative to release new services that delivered Class of Service (CoS) over its existing internet access and virtual private network (VPN) services. Customers contracting for these services needed to assess performance across all classes of service it received.
IT Solution
To support the legacy infrastructure, Windward had previously implemented InfoVista’s performance management solution. The providers new investments required highly customized monitoring and reporting for its VPN service, its Voice over Network (VoN) service, and a major new client of the service providers.
Working with this performance management system, Windward customized VPN CoS reports to provide scalable reporting of SLA metric for the provider’s customers. As a result, customers could access reports on the percentage of packets dropped per queue, giving insight into how many bytes of information were discarded due to insufficient service bandwidth. Secondly, reports on bandwidth utilization per CoS provided technical staff and customers with information on how much bandwidth was being used compared to the subscribed bandwidth.
Windward also utilized the InfoVista solution to monitor the new VoN service and provide performance statistics on the quality of service. Due to the recent development of VoN, many reports required polling metrics that SNMP agents did not provide. To overcome this challenge, Windward mapped requested reports to vendor MIB attributes, tested vendor SNMP agents to verify attribute reporting, constructed report templates for metrics that were not reported, and initiated data collection and report validation.
The final component of the initiative was development of a state-of-the-art Network Operating Center (NOC) for a major client that would provide access and core layer MPLS reports. In addition to design and rolling out these reports, Windward activated a threshold monitoring solution which correlated performance issues SAA agent failure traps from Cisco. This end-to-end reporting solution enabled the NOC to be proactive in responding to both availability and performance incidents.
Guaranteed Result
By delivering a scalable, robust and targeted solution, Windward enabled the telecommunication company to attain:
- More efficient network utilization due to precise and timely information to network engineers
- Improved monitoring of and increased information on overall quality of service
- Ability to proactively respond to network events due to improved notification system
Overall, the Windward solutions enabled our client to provide verifiably better service for its customers.