Closing Last Discovery Gaps in NetACE – Discovery via NMS
The only way to get information from very “old” legacy devices is often via the vendor specific Element Management System (EMS) or even more general via the respective Network Management System (NMS). Once the capability are integrated in the discovery engine, you can claim that you can discover truly every SW-steered device-type in a network.
This is exactly what we achieved in the last couple of months in a huge project in cooperation with AMDOCs. This was the challenge we were facing: In a very large telecommunication network (more than 100k devices) consisting of Mobile Access and Core (2G, 3G and 4G) and Fixed Access and Data Core from different vendors over the last 20 years. NetACE’s task is to discover all of the network devices and communicate the information via a REST-API in an agreed standard data format to an upper layer inventory system.
The way on how NetACE coped with this challenge can be described in the following 3 steps:
- Communicate with each of the devices in the network (SBI)
- Transform into agreed data format
- Handover to upper layer System (NBI)
Let’s briefly describe each of those steps in more detail as it shows the enormous power of NetACE when it comes to Network Discovery.
Communicate with each of the devices in the network: the operational access to the devices could be done either directly to the devices (via Telnet/CLI, XML, TL1) or via the vendor specific NMS NBI (ftp, sftp, Corba, TL1, SOAP, XML, REST). The key here is that the NetACE supports all the variety of different protocols and can work with 40 different NMS instances in parallel.
Transform into agreed format: the devices information format needs to be handed over to an upper layer system depends obviously on the purpose of later data-use. The key for successful transformation is to be capable to do the process in a fast and flexible way using a simple GUI-based representation of the data, which allows a “click and drop” assignment of the different data. The NetACE supports such functionality with his new web-based GUI.
Handover to upper layer System: Once the data is available in the right format, handover is done via REST API, where the data representation is obviously part of the interface agreement – in our case it UDM XML and CSV-format.
This project is a real prove that the NetACE has the capability to discover any type of legacy device an in any network!
Interested to get this demonstrated? Feel free to contact us, request a demo or a free trial – more information can be found on Atrinet’s website (https://www.atrinet.com/).