Service Visualization Application - See what you've got!

Displaying real time customer network & service topology

By giving customers full transparency into their outsourced VPN services, service providers restore their customers' peace of mind. The ability to communicate more effectively with their customers improves customer responsiveness and leads to higher customer satisfaction, and lower customer churn. This increase in productivity maximizes revenue and profitability and reduces the overall operating cost.

Elanti's Service Visualization Application enables customers to audit their outsourced services and facilitates communication between the service provider and their customers.

The Service Visualization Application is a distributed java web application designed for delivery via a customer service portal. The same application is used by both the customer and the service provider.

The Visualization Application renders a real time network & service topology of the customer's business solution. The information relating to the customer's service is extracted from the service provider's inventory, configuration and element management systems. Consequently, the visualization represents the customer's VPN service as it has actually been deployed.

Only attributes and data important to the respective user are displayed. For the VPN customer, irrelevant detail, such as the core network and its topology, are concealed. However the service provider's staff requires more comprehensive data and topological detail.

In addition to the VPN topology, additional services that are being provided to the customer are also shown. For example, if a customer has access to the Internet and Hosting services, via a firewall, with NAT and Virus Scanning services then these would also be displayed on the screen.

The visualization application also displays network status information as described in the Service Assurance solution.

	One global view: The example shows the VPN of one particular customer. The central VPN Core represents the service provider‘s network, which typically will be complex infrastructure that may span many products. However, for the customer’s view of their VPN service, this unnecessary detail is hidden.
	Detail on demand: An interactive graphical user interface allows users to zoom in and see any detail of their deployed customer solution.
	Drill down even more: Users can drill down on any element provided in the diagram. Information on their access links can be readily obtained by clicking on the respective link. For example, the configuration details of a Frame Relay access, such as the physical line speed, IP addresses for each end of the link and the DLCI number, can rendered on demand.

Solution overview:

Figure 1. Service Visualization Application

Figure 1 illustrates the interaction of the Elanti Service Visualization Application with the customer’s and service provider’s infrastructure.

The service providers’ Operational Support Systems (OSS) manages the configuration of most of the service elements in the customer business solution.
The Elanti Service Management Solution reads and caches relevant configuration data from the service provider OSS.
At some point in time a customer, having gained authenticated access to the service portal, starts the visualization application and requests a view of one of their services.
The request is processed by the Service Visualization Application. Each of the service elements comprising the customer business solution is identified, and the graphical rendering of the solution is created.
The completed diagram is returned to the customer. The customer is able to print, zoom, manipulate and search the diagram without any further reference to the application.

The Elanti Service Management Systems’ Service Visualization Application allows customers and service providers to audit the “as built” customer solution, essentially improving customer communication and reducing overall operational costs for the service provider.