OccamView™
Element Management System
Highlights
- Comprehensive global view of network services / status from one location
- Links between network elements, services, and subscribers
- Central repository for general and technical device information
- Group and user management for highest level of security
- Device discovery and data collection scheduler
- Geographical network topology with links and location managers
- Real-time fault and event management and behavior definition
- Instantaneous notification of network devices failures and users affected
- Performance management with threshold alarms
- ONT Configuration Manager provisions and configures optical network terminals
- Web GUI, SSH and Telnet cut through
- Integrates with other operational support systems (OSS) and network management systems (NMS)
OccamView™ is a carrier-class element management system (EMS) that manages Occam BLC-based access networks. It provides a wide array of advanced management services from alarm management to performance monitoring to diagnostic analysis. OccamView centralizes and automates management and scales to meet the needs of small-to-medium regional service providers and large, geographically diverse network operators.
OccamView Tools and Features
OccamView EMS delivers a wide variety of advanced management tools and features to make managing and operating your access network faster, easier and more convenient.
Fault Management
OccamView provides an alarm window that displays network-wide faults/events, color-coded based on alarm severity level. Faults can also be viewed via a topology map of the network, allowing administrators to focus on the problem regions immediately. Details and notes that are recorded while the alarm is open are available for each event and network device. Various filters based on location, severity and device qualifications can be set to define alarm actions, to determine who sees alarms and to manage contact closures in the CO.
Event Management
OccamView provides flexible event templates with threshold qualifiers that determine when and how network events are turned into alarms. OccamView EMS defines a variety of event sources such as Java RMI events and SNMP traps and can be customized to support other event notifications.
Configuration Management
With OccamView, administrators can automatically schedule a variety of configuration management functions including software upgrades and backup and restoration. OccamView also manages blade provisioning and service configurations via a cut through to the embedded web interface (EWI) and to the command line interface (CLI) of the BLC. OccamView includes the ONT Configuration Manager (OCM) for provisioning and configuring optical network terminals that connect to Active Ethernet FTTP optical line terminals.
Performance Monitoring
OccamView monitors network performance down to the interface level and, using off-the-shelf reporting tools, records the device’s port statistics in a database for later analysis. Statistics can be plotted graphically and exported for further analysis.
Inventory Management
OccamView makes inventory management easy with its network and device discovery capability. EMS software identifies devices and their associated physical and logical attributes by their IP addresses. Using this information it creates a complete inventory of the BLC network. Devices can be partitioned into groups by location, equipment type, software revision, etc. for easy isolation of administration domains.
Root Cause Analysis
This OccamView function aids in diagnosis of network problems, identification of the true cause of system events and alarms and saves administrators diagnostic and troubleshooting time.
Security
OccamView maintains network security by controlling access to the BLC network through user accounts and groups. All user activity is controlled via username and password entry. Each user is given varying levels of access to the network. User activity logs enable the administrator to easily pinpoint and address any unusual user activity.
Service Activation
OccamView provides tools to manage subscribers and associate subscribers with services and ports and devices. It also supports a transaction-based model for service activation that provides rollback and failure notification if any of the provisioning steps fail thus preventing the proliferation of incorrect configurations and incorrectly allocated ports and circuits.
Service Level Agreements
OccamView monitors and reports on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defined by the administrator. Once an administrator defines SLA parameters and levels such as uptime and bandwidth, OccamView proactively monitors them to assure service quality. Administrators may configure thresholds on service affecting parameters.
OccamView EMS Components
OccamView EMS consists of four essential software components, including:
BackEnd Server (BE). BE Server software includes the database server and performs core network facing functions, such as device discovery, data collection, report generation and status polling.
FrontEnd Server (FE). FE Server software transmits information between the Client software and the BE Server. OccamView can be easily scaled to support growing numbers of network subscribers by adding FE Servers.
Client. Client software provides the user interface to the FE Server. Client software is available in HTML or Java Web Start formats.
ONT Configuration Manager (OCM). The ONT Configuration Manager is a CLI-style interface for provisioning and configuring optical network terminals, upgrading ONT software and managing services across multiple ONTs that connect to Gigabit Ethernet FTTP optical line terminals. OCM enables service providers to provision individual, bulk and global configurations simplifying service provisioning and lowering OpEx. It is included at no additional cost with the EMS BackEnd Server. EMS connects OCM for provisioning Active Ethernet FTTP ONTs; however OCM can also be accessed directly.
BE and FE Server components can be distributed across multiple hardware platforms, allowing OccamView EMS to scale to meet the demands of very large, growing networks.
OccamView EMS integrates with other operational support systems (OSS) and network management systems (NMS) to simplify managing larger networks. The OccamView framework integrates with these systems through SNMP for northbound traffic and SNMP, Telnet, SSH, HTML, XML and Java RMI for southbound traffic.
The OccamView EMS framework also includes a distributable Mediation Server within the BE Server that can manage large, carrier grade networks by load balancing network facing functions among several Mediation Servers. Additionally, OccamView provides monitoring of syslog device messaging.