In a Service Fulfillment operations environment, OSS uptime is critical for Service Activation. Minimizing downtime and access to managed network resources to activate services for customers is mission-critical.

Problems:

Here are some operational problems that NETeXPERT users may experience which impact OpEx costs relating to NETeXPERT Gateways:

Cost of Re-starting Gateways during downtime: Starting of gateways can take minutes to hours as the user must manually select 1 to "n" gateways from Gateway Manager to start a block of gateways at a time. So it becomes very costly for operators to manually sit and start these gateways, especially if they are manually started during off-business hours such as on a weekend where it further increases OpEx.

Cost of missing critical events: Gateways may sometimes stop communicating with the far end managed element without any indicator in Gateway Manager that the connectively has been lost. For example the gateway remains green when actually the protocol agent connected to the gateway has lost communication with a far-end terminal server port. This can be very costly to NOC operators as critical alarms may be missed and furthermore they are not even archived since they were not collected into the gateway.

Cost of not restarting gateways immediately: Furthermore the longer the gateways are down the higher the risk that critical data will be missed or activations will be out-of-synch. Restarting gateways is not automatic and NOCs then must try to assess whether alerts were missed, services were impacted, and if customers lost service. Gateways should be restarted automatically.

Cost of long maintenance windows: Maintenance windows can be too long as gateways are restarted for new equipment, new rulesets, ruleset upgrades, and other modifications. Ideally maintenance windows need to be reduced to the point that any gateway changes are transparent to the operation center to minimize any loss of critical functions.

Cost of disaster recovery: Gateways connected to one IDEAS server can become flooded due to a network failure, which may be caused by a disaster or network outage, and gateways need to be moved quickly to another server to continue monitoring messages. Ideally there should be a quick way to copy and deploy gateways from a primary system to a backup system.

Cost of managing "n" gateways across "m" systems: NETeXPERT users have 100’s to 1000’s of gateways to manage in their operational environments. The configuration of these gateways today is not unified seamlessly between 1 or more systems. NETeXPERT Gateway Manager and Administration are specific to each system only and do not provide that unified seamless view across multiple systems.

Cost of upgrading NETeXPERT: Upgrading NETeXPERT from 5.0 to 6.0 or from 6.x to 6.y involves potential operating system, server, database, and functionality changes. Ideally, NETeXPERT Gateways should be easily managed and deployed across one production system to an upgraded production system to minimze impact on operations. The cut-over from one system to another can be phased by transitioning blocks of gateways and tools should be provided to roll-back gateways if problems arise in the upgraded system.

Cost of development, test, and deployment: Finally the most common problem is the basic “Development, Test, and Production Gateway Use Case” where all rules are first developed for a specific managed resource on a development system. Once this ruleset is tested, it then is deployed to 1 or more production systems across various gateways that must be created and configured. This gateway deployment process today is manually executed through package administration scripts.

Solution:

Gateway Central (GC) and Automated Gateway Management (AGM) have been developed through customer funded requirements to address the needs above and continues to help customers in reducing daily development, deployment, and operational costs with NETeXPERT deployments.

Furthermore, as with Version Control Distribution System, there is a tree view and a table view of the gateways, both of which are customizable and display NETeXPERT-specific information about the gateways across multiple systems. All tree and table entries are color-coded as well, to indicate each gateway's status as in Gateway Manager.

For additional information see our products page.
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