Extreme Networks White Paper
© 2010 Extreme Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Ridgeline Service Advisor—5
Visual User Interface for Service Assurance
In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace where
subscribers are on the constant lookout for new services
that provide them the best value, enhancing subscriber
experience is crucial. Service assurance requires real-time
detailed visibility into the network and proactive detection
of network problems to ensure uninterrupted, high-quality
services that subscribers count on.
The CLI method makes service assurance a significant
challenge. Once the operator is notified of an alarm, the
process involved in finding out its impact on services
requires a series of tasks. For example, suppose an alarm
indicates that a particular link is down. The operator must
first determine which VLANs are on the link. Next, the
operator must figure out which network elements are
associated with these VLANs. The operator must then
determine which ports are active or inactive on those
network elements, and then make references to the
database to determine which services are mapped to these
active ports. These steps require the operator to have
detailed knowledge about the network when executing the
CLI commands. Clearly, having to perform these tasks for
every alarm is tedious and time-consuming.
Extreme Networks Ridgeline Service Advisor addresses this
problem by hiding the complexity of the converged
network, with detailed and easy-to-understand representa-
tions of service status or issues. Ridgeline Service Advisor
provides a detailed consolidated view of the entire services
network with up/down status, and fault-to-service correlation
that provides a quick view of physical links, VLANs, or
services which have been impacted. This detailed informa-
tion provides network operators the ability to easily
determine how many subscribers have been affected at
which location. Based on the magnitude of impact, network
operators can effectively prioritize their troubleshooting
tasks for resolution. The upfront information also drastically
reduces the mean-time-to-repair of service issues, enabling
carriers to enhance subscriber experience.
Figure 2 below is an illustration of Ridgeline Service
Advisor’s fault-to-service correlation capability. The faulty
link between two switches is shown as the red dotted line.
The ‘services’ tab under the navigation table lists the two
services that are impacted.
Figure 2. Fault-to-Service Correlation
