- Plan new services and technologies
- Predict performance and change impact
- Optimize capacity, QoS and reliability
- Diagram logical and physical infrastructure
- Detect changes in topology, configurations, and performance
- Audit routers, switches, and firewalls
- Validate configuration changes
- Visualize real-time network behaviour and performance
- Alert critical situations
- Troubleshoot suboptimal performance and outages
- Verify proposed designs
SP Guru Network Planner and IT Guru Network Planner accurately assess new service, application, and technology deployments. Its intelligent what-if environment incorporates extensive technology and protocol support for VoIP or VPN based service roll-outs and next-generation network technologies such as MPLS and IPv6. Clients significantly accelerate the deployment of such initiatives by quantifying cost, performance and reliability ahead of time.
Predict Network Performance and the Impact of Change
Effectively managing changes and reducing the associated risk is a prime priority of network engineering departments. SP Guru Network Planner and IT Guru Network Planner combine operational network data with precise offline analytics, providing detailed insight in the impact of changes on network behavior and end-to-end performance. The predictive environment pinpoints capacity bottlenecks, configuration problems, and network vulnerabilities, thereby guaranteeing the most optimal operation of the network.
Optimize Capacity, QoS and Reliability
Continuous network growth and the ongoing convergence of new services on a unified underlying network infrastructure, requires a methodological approach to using network resources as efficiently as possible, while at the same time guaranteeing the performance requirements of supported services and applications. SP Guru Network Planner and IT Guru Network Planner automatically right-size bandwidth, propose optimal QoS configurations, and suggest routing metric changes to converge on an optimal network design. In addition, SP Guru Network Planner, provides advanced MPLS Traffic Engineering capabilities to optimize bandwidth utilization and network reliability.
Diagram Logical and Physical Infrastructure
Maintaining current network diagrams is a significant challenge for many organizations, due to the inherent network complexity and frequency of changes. NetMapper eliminates the burdensome manual effort associated with producing network diagrams, providing always accurate, complete, and timely views so users can diagnose network issues more rapidly, plan for change more effectively, and operate more productively. The up-to-date diagrams of the network topology provide detailed physical and logical views of the network including: Layer 2/3, VPN, OSPF, BGP and VLANs.
Detect Changes in Topology, Configuration and Performance
Effectively detecting and managing changes is imperative for ensuring quality of service and reducing operational risks. Leveraging the automatically generated reports by IT Sentinel and SP Sentinel, organizations immediately identify configuration and topology changes, and quickly pinpoint performance changes and the root cause of network outages. In addition, Sentinel’s powerful network scoring and trending capabilities allow tracking network health over time.
Proactively Validate Configuration Changes
A large proportion of network errors continue to be caused by misconfigurations. IT Sentinel and SP Sentinel's Proactive Change Validation takes a proactive approach to validating proposed configuration changes to quickly determine the impact of potential changes on network security, integrity, and policy-compliance, prior to implementing the changes in the production network. Leveraging Sentinel’s powerful configuration assurance engine, organizations can greatly enhance their ability to assess risk as part of the change management process.
Audit the Network on a Scheduled Basis
IT Sentinel and SP Sentinel perform automated, systematic, network-wide configuration audits of routers, switches, and firewalls, identifying errors and misconfigurations that can impact network availability, performance, and security. Sentinel enhances network security with built-in templates to analyze ACLs, firewall policies, device administrative control, service authorization, and other security controls. Sentinel’s comprehensive audits also guarantee compliance with popular policies, including FISMA, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, NIST, as well as best practice guidelines by Cisco, NSA, and others.
Visualize Real-Time Network Behavior and Performance
The traditional approach to network management involves multiple point tools, each providing insight into a limited part of the network. Consequently, network operators find it difficult to identify performance bottlenecks and network outages. OPNET nCompass for Enterprises and OPNET nCompass for Service Providers address this requirement by providing a single pane of glass view of operational data such as topology, traffic, and events, with targeted dashboards on key performance indicators (KPIs). OPNET nCompass unifies data from a broad range of network devices and management tools, providing consolidated real-time views for more intuitive and productive navigation and analysis.
Alert Critical Network Issues
To increase situational awareness and rapidly remediate critical issues, OPNET nCompass for Enterprises and OPNET nCompass for Service Providers respond to abnormal network conditions as they occur. Based on defined thresholds for monitored KPIs, nCompass automatically triggers an event when a threshold is surpassed. Event notification occurs within the console, using visual icons and audio alerts, as well as in the form of emails, pager messages, SNMP traps, or trouble tickets. As such, clients save valuable time that is otherwise spent on correlating information from multiple individual management tools.
Immediately Troubleshoot Sub-Optimal Performance and Outages
Using the consolidated views and integrated event notification of OPNET nCompass for Enterprises and OPNET nCompass for Service Providers, organizations rapidly diagnose and troubleshoot critical issues, such as performance degradations or network outages. In addition, nCompass provides one-click access to the underlying network management tools for specialized troubleshooting, as well as interfaces to devices for executing commands and troubleshooting scripts. Contextual launch in OPNET’s analysis engine or in third-party tools can be manually invoked or triggered automatically in response to a network event.
Verify Proposed Designs and Solutions
Rapid remediation of critical issues not only depends on fast troubleshooting, but also requires accurate answers to resolve problems, as well as the ability to test whether suggested changes have the desired effect. SP Guru Network Planner and IT Guru Network Planner’s comprehensive analytics framework verifies proposed designs and solutions, and predicts whether proposed changes properly resolve identified problems and inefficiencies. In addition, the patent-pending QuickPlan feature set automatically suggests tactical changes, using incremental traffic engineering principles, to quickly address issues such as local network congestion and network outages.