For a long time the Creanord EchoVault strength has been the high precision of network quality and bandwidth utilization information. But while the trend thrives for managing more with fewer professionals the tools needs to evolve to assist both the operations and the business personnel. The automatic exceptions reporting, rich event notifications and advanced analytics are prime examples of the new requirements.

Analytics

Granular performance measurements are absolute requirement while Providers are offering business critical network services for large enterprises and government agencies. However storing vast amount of raw data for historical reporting and trending purposes poses both usability and scaling problems.

With above in mind the Analytics Engine calculates automatically max, min, average, median and percentile-based stats for all key SLA metrics over intervals from 1 minute to 30 days. For example once the month has elapsed Provider has the option to manage database size by instructing Analytics Engine to remove the previous month raw data while keeping the Analytics data for longer period of time.

It’s also important to track and report easy to understand Key Quality Indicators while monitoring overall network health. For this purpose Analytics Engine calculates Service Availability percent (individually for every circuit) according to Service Provider defined objectives.

Events

Service Providers Network Operation Center (NOC) is already overwhelmed with alarms that are triggered with light grounds. On the other hand too high thresholds lead to the situation where NOC is unaware of decreased performance.

EchoVault’s Event Engine implements filtering mechanism where event notifications are sent to selected SNMP Managers only when the set tolerance levels are exceeded. As a consequence actual rising and falling thresholds for warning and critical notifications can be defined as strict as required. Furthermore, changing the Tolerance of one especially problematic circuit is possible to avoid flood of events.

The Event Engine is enabled by AEDS Engine configuration and each engine can have up to three (3) SNMPv2 Managers as notification destinations.

Dashboards

Dashboard Engine enables the EchoVault user to publish for example customer specific Analytics and Service Availability information either in the EchoVault user interface or in the Service Providers own customer reporting portal of choice. The latter option is simply realized by URL linking (e.g. HTML iframe) between the Portal and EchoVault Dashboard Engine interface. Standards based open APIs provide also the possibility for integrating SLA reporting as part of your own reporting platform.

Dashboards quick response time and whole “web browsing experience” is achieved by calculating all the metrics beforehand with Analytics & Stats Engines as new results are collected. While the most current status is already computed on the background the Dashboard simply needs to present the data when user requests a specific view.

Privileges for external Dashboard users are assigned based on EchoVault Spotlights. This allows flexible access control to the Dashboards.

Typical overview presentation illustrates daily or monthly KPIs per circuit with an expand option presenting either time or Analytics operator based details.

The Service Availability percent is presented for then-current FSR (e.g. 5 min) and respectively cumulative 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week and 1 month Service Availability status is shown. It is also possible to view daily business hours based Service Availability. Furthermore the user interface allows easy historical browsing with previous and next period arrows.

Stats

The Statistics Engine is a lightweight EchoVault routine that analyzes performance and network utilization metrics. Instead of continuously saving the calculated results to the database the Statistics Engine only stores the data needed for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics reports. For example while processing the network utilization KPIs the Statistics Engine can highlight single traffic peaks of ten second or one minute period with the date and time details. Furthermore it's able to produce a count of 10 second periods where the bandwidth usage is more than 60%. To present the statistics Creanord EchoVault provides wide choice of options; from SQL and XML integration to complete Dashboard and Portal visualization.