A telecommunications provider’s OSS (Operations Support Systems) is foundational to operating a reliable network. It oversees monitoring, analyzing, and managing the network to keep it up and running. But the outcomes of these processes are only as good as the data on which they are based, which makes a quality documentation tool a critical must-have. FNT's Network Inventory Management software, which documents, tracks and manages the lifecycle of all network assets, delivers on all fronts and fits perfectly into any OSS environment.
Advantages of FNT’s Network Inventory Management Software
Accurate data about the current state of the network is provided for planning network transformations. Data stays synchronized with automatic updates to the documentation when planned changes are executed.
Identify affected services and customers when equipment maintenance is needed and proactively inform those impacted. See what protections exist and plan necessary circuit rerouting to avoid SLA breaches.
Assign services and circuits to devices to understand utilization and capacity. Find and reassign stranded assets. Reduce unnecessary capital expenses by only expanding capacity when required.
Differentiate between and manage service protection scenarios, including diverse end-to-end routing on active transport and passive infrastructure layers and cross media auto-routing.
Immediately identify affected services and customers in case of an outage or other performance issue. Provide data enrichment via APIs to optimize incident and problem management processes.
Highlights of FNT’s Network Inventory Management Software
FNT’s Network Inventory Management software governs all physical, logical, and virtual resources in the network and their relations to services and consumers. With this information users have the information needed to answer important questions such as which resources are available? How do they contribute to the delivery of services? Who consumes which services?
These difficult questions become easy to answer with FNT software. It’s built to handle networks that contain a heterogenous mix of technologies, domains, and manufacturers. FNT houses all network information in one comprehensive data model, which is enriched from multiple data sources and shared with other applications. All this is accomplished with extensive out-of-the-box integration capabilities. The result is a single source of truth for holistic telecom network management.
FAQ: Network Inventory Management
A network inventory keeps track of all assets in the telecom network, making it possible to know at any given time which resources you have, which are planned, their status, and all relevant details. And since documentation is not static, keeping it up to date is critical for it to provide the intended value. The importance of gathering and maintaining this information cannot be overstated, because using outdated and inaccurate data for planning and fault resolution can have disastrous consequences on the functioning of the network.
An accurate and optimized network inventory makes it possible for a network operator to efficiently provide high-quality and resilient services to customers at lower operational costs. Network inventory solutions work by collecting and managing data about the network and infrastructure. The assets that make up the network and managed by the inventory system are:
- Active assets – Examples include routers, switches and multiplexers. They’re called active devices because they are powered and usually have interfaces (APIs) that allow up-to-date information to be collected from them.
- Passive assets – Examples include cables, junction / splice boxes and racks. They’re called passive devices because they don’t have active electronics so there is no way of harvesting stored information from them.
- Logical / virtual overlays - Examples include logical circuits, virtual private networks (VPNs), virtual network functions (VNFs), etc. These logical entities may exist within one domain (e.g., a logical circuit in a transmission network) or could cross many different network domains (e.g., an SD-WAN that includes access networks from different service providers around the world).
A network inventory system is vital for keeping the network healthy and functioning. It is almost impossible to adequately manage today’s advanced, dynamic, virtualized networks without a comprehensive and near-real-time view of network assets and resources. A network inventory system provides this view to support general network operation levels, uptime quotient, and capacity planning.
A dynamic network inventory supplies network operators with up-to-date awareness of their network, assets, surroundings and available routing / connectivity in near-real-time. This information is vital input to many different types of workflows and solving different types of problems. Almost all business-as-usual workflows service providers and network operators perform have some sort of dependency on their network inventory solution.
Network inventory is a prerequisite for network management and supports or facilitates the most essential use cases: Asset Information / Management: captures and stores up-to-date information about the network and all its components to enable insights and actions to be performed Fulfillment: enables customers to be connected to the network, including network resource allocation for customer use
Assurance: identifies network bottlenecks, customer impacts and their root-causes, routes data traffic around the problem and manages repair activities Planning: informs about the current capacity and status of the network and helps assess the outcome of alternative configurations / changes
Digital Twin: provides a representation of all current assets and connectivity as well as up-to-date performance / health status of each asset in the network Today’s networks are continually evolving to accommodate new digital requirements.
Frequent changes to the network include adding new assets, decommissioning old ones, changing configurations, and rerouting circuits. This constant fluctuation of asset status and use within the network makes losing track of the documentation state a real risk. A network inventory tool mitigates this risk and makes it easier to maintain a functioning network.
Unified resource management – Today’s complex networks use assets and resources from the active telecommunication transport network, passive inside- and outside plant infrastructure, as well as IT and data center infrastructure environments. All are instrumental in delivering telecommunication services and should be managed holistically in a single database. This approach makes it possible to view network data, relationships and dependencies across all technologies and domains, which greatly simplifies keeping track of the network’s diverse resources.
Integration – For a network inventory solution to do its job, it must always reflect the real network. Exchanging data with other systems is therefore a must. A network inventory tool should have an extensive integration layer that reconciles data from third-party systems and exposes information to any application that needs it. APIs, ETL technologies, and prepackaged interfaces facilitate collecting, reconciling and using data from various sources.
Visualization – Being able to view network infrastructure and service data graphically makes it possible to recognize patterns within the data and gain a better understanding of dependencies. Such easier extraction of insights from the data drives better decisions, faster response times, and improved overall efficiency.
Would you like to experience the FNT solution for Network Inventory Management live?
Further Downloads
Would you like to know more about Network Inventory Management? Then you might be interested in the following:
