Advanced Proactive Support

Infrastructure performance & reporting

Advanced Proactive Support provides visibility into the performance of the IT infrastructure and rapid identification and resolution of any network-related faults. It combines a powerful network management system with a 24x7 Service Desk, enabling customers to have the highest possible standard in rapid response services.

Overview

A unique monitoring application, monitors your network, It shows the status of the network environment (with the ability to drill-down to the source of any faults) and provide statistical information on network health and performance.

Behind the application is a team of engineers who constantly monitor all devices and respond to all incidents.

The network management system also utilizes a business-rules based approach, to ensure that priority is given to critical systems and devices.

This may include configuration-related issues, hardware faults or Telco issues. Regardless of the problem sources, all incidents are resolved and progress of open tickets can be tracked through the network management application.

Benefits

Advanced Proactive Support translates to business benefits across four broad areas:

• Access to skills: Highly skilled engineers monitor your network 24x7, ensuring rapid response to any incident within 15mins of a detected alert.
• Business-focused: Customers’ business rules are captured in the management tools and directly drive escalation and remedial processes.
• Increased Visibility: A Web-based management application provides complete visibility into the IT environment, improving capacity planning processes.
• Reduced Risk & Complexity: Customers can reduce infrastructure support costs, with no capital costs. A Software-as-a-Service approach almost instant deployment of the monitoring tools with no impact on the customer’s network.

Service Features

User interface

• Home page presents a summary of high level information regarding the status of the network
• Dashboard warning lights (viewable at all times)
• Alert counters
• Recent incident and change management cases
• Logs
• Ability to “drill-down” from alerts to a specific issue and establish the root cause of a problem within seconds
  

Configuration Management

• Centralised repository for all device information (asset details, contacts etc) facilitates rapid trouble-shooting
  Incident Management
• Comprehensive real-time view of network via a Dashboard providing instant status of each infrastructure area)
• Interactive network (topology) map shows status of devices (with drill-down capabilities) and lets users select their own map (geographical maps, maps of buildings or floor plans etc).
• Sophisticated auto-notification engine enables contacts to receive an alert via SMS or email whenever there an event occurs on a managed device.
• Mobile and email delivery options
• Rules can be set to ensure staff only receive relevant alerts
  

Performance / Capacity Management

• Identify problems before they impact performance
• Graphs and statistics on an extensive range of device attributes, at a device level or by interface or component
• Powerful on-demand analysis:
• View information over user-defined time period
• Summarise data in different ways to to identify peaks and troughs
• Apply trend line
• Exclude weekend or limit data to (user-definable) business hours
  

Reporting (ReportWriter)

• Powerful, on-line reporting tool that is used to generate customised reports across any aspect of the IT infrastructure. Reports can be configured and run:
• Across any grouping of devices (eg. all WAN or LAN interfaces)
• For any time period
• For any statistical information captured by nVisage (eg. availability, latency, traffic utilisation, CPU/ memory) can be reported for any grouping of devices.

Service Deliverables

Configuration Management

• Device Details: Device location, serial number, model and IOS/software version are available in one location, for asset tracking. 
• Location & Site Contact Details: Physical device locations and site contact/s are stored, for fast access in the event of an incident requiring on-site response. 
• Configuration Backup and Tracking: Hardware configurations are checked daily against the stored configuration, and backed up where it differs. This allows comparison of any two versions and quick restoration if a device is replaced.

Incident and Problem Management

• Online Status of Device: Overall status of the network is presented as Critical, Major, Minor or Normal (live status based on polling every 5 minutes) with the ability to drill-down to individual devices and interfaces.
• Topology View: Graphical view of all devices and Layer 3 connections. Also displays Online Status of Device. A custom background image may be uploaded to show geographic or site map.
• Online Alert Logs: SNMP traps, missed polls and other device alerts are stored in an easy to search, summarisable online log and filtered according to customer-defined device criticality.
• Customer defined device criticality: Device categories are defined so faults are interpreted based on business impact, not the technical nature of the fault. Devices are assigned a category based on their importance to the business.
• Device based Action Policy: An Action policy determines how we respond to a fault and what customer escalations are required. Each device can have a default, business hours and/or after hours action policy.

Availability Management

• Latency: Latency measurements will show trends for increases or decreases in network performance, graphed over a period of time, as measures from the Intrapower poller at 5 minute intervals
• Reachability / Availability: Reporting on availability of monitored devices as measured by sysuptime (includes outages, total length of outages and % availability over a user-definable period of time).
• Availability (State) of Interface / PVC: Status icon representing the state of each interface, device component or process/application (also rolled up to a status icon representing all network devices).

Performance & Capacity Management

• Health Statistics: Measures and reports the percentage of CPU and memory usage, graphed over a period of time (daily, weekly, monthly or user-definable date or time range).
• Interface Statistics: Traffic & Packet - Measures packets in and out and errors at an interface level, with the ability to graph over any period of time, add trending analysis and report on average, minimum and maximum values.

Service Desk

• Fault Rectification: All incidents are managed through to resolution, including the coordination of onsite resources, telcos, maintenance providers and other 3rd parties, as per the Action policy.
• 24 x 7 Action Policy permitted: Engineers will respond to faults and initiate the appropriate Action Policy 24x7 (there may be different remedial actions defined for business hours compared to out-of-hours)
• Response Time: Investigation and resolution of a fault, and initiation of the Action Policy when a Minor, Major or Critical alert is generated, will commence within 15 minutes of the alert being generated.

Reporting

• Automated alert notification: Alerts can be automatically sent via email or SMS. This is set across all devices based on Event Severity (Critical, Major, Minor, Warning), Delivery mechanism (email and/or SMS) and number of alerts required to trigger an automated notification (1 to 100) within a 1-minute period
• Online Reporting: A Statistics Navigator provides ad-hoc reporting of any collected network statistics. Custom reports can created and run over a defined period of time using the on-line ReportWriter application.