Converged platform for hybrid requirement, 1-minute data collection, real-time data monitoring. These are some of the market requirements today for network performance monitoring. With all these requirements, come a massive amount of data. How do you find the data that you need to start monitoring effectively?
Telco Network Cloud Manager – Performance, TNC-P in short, is a Cloud-native platform for network performance data analytics.
TNC-P comes with out-of-the-box dashboards and reports, ready for users to use as data starts to come in. There are dashboards that focus on technology (Mobile, IP, SD-WAN, etc.). There are also generic dashboards, consolidating all data into one view.
While navigating the rich dashboard content, the best place to start viewing performance data immediately is Metric viewer.
Metric viewer, a good starting point
Metric viewer, an out-of-the-box reporting capability, is a UI that allows users to view anything and everything collected by TNC-P. One UI for all performance data, regardless of technology, vendor, and collection protocols.
This simplifies the user experience. Immediate access to all the devices, together with performance metrics collected by TNC-P as soon as the data is available in the database.
Using TNC-P to view the performance data should not be rocket science, and that is what Metric viewer provides. Search for the devices, then select the performance metrics, and there you go, visibility into the device performance.
Who will find the Metric viewer helpful?
Almost everyone who uses TNC-P in their daily operations. Here are some examples.
- Network administrator who is responsible for making sure that new device/EMS data is collected successfully by TNC-P. A simple check to see that once the performance data is available in Metric viewer, it is a sign that end-to-end data flow is successful from device/EMS all the way to report.
- Domain performance engineer who needs to quickly assess the historical trend and perform a comparative analysis of problematic devices. The Metric viewer provides a historical and current view, of all the devices and performance metrics. Compare different devices and/or metrics with multiple charts for a better viewing experience.
- NOC engineer who needs to relate alarms to performance data trends. An alarm signifies that the device is having an issue. Performance metric gives the device trend, whether a one-time dip/spike or bordering threshold. Correlating the data together provides more insight into the problematic device. Out-of-the-box integration is supported for Alarm Manager (Watson AIOps) to Metric viewer (TNC-P)
Metric viewer key capabilities
One UI for all data is helpful, but without supporting capabilities to ease your work, it will be just that, a UI. The following vital capabilities make Metric viewer the one UI.
- Search faster and search better. With thousands of devices, faster and accurate search capability leads to efficient troubleshooting.
- Real-time data. You will have a complete view of the trend, from historical to the most current data available from the devices.
- Device and user-defined KPIs. Performance metrics are not limited to only counter from vendor equipment; it also includes user-defined calculation and analytics KPIs (performance metrics aggregated by element and/or time). This gives a meaningful insight into the performance from network down to device level view.
- Before and after change analysis. Based on your view preference, you can compare device performance for various combination – against multiple devices, against multiple performance metrics, and against different time range.
- Threshold analysis. Helps you understand whether a performance spike or dip is breaching the threshold line.
- Interactive reporting capability. You will have the flexibility to work with the data better. Zoom in to a specific time range, hide data that is not needed from the view and change the chart type based on your preference.
The Metric viewer was designed to simplify the user experience. One UI to find the correct data, without educating yourself – what technology, which equipment vendor, SNMP or file-based, and the list goes on…
See the attached video to understand better.
For more details, contact Shereniza Abu Kassim (1shere@my.ibm.com)
Written by Shereniza Abu Kassim (Senior Architect, TNCP) and curated by Gouri Ekkirala (Senior Technical Communications Specialist)