VPN Reporting
Ensuring Quality of Service for Enterprise VPN Customers
Overview
IP-based virtual private network (VPN) services offer organizations cost-effective, fully meshed business connectivity between offices, across the same town or across the globe, and can represent a more cost-efficient and secure option than frame relay (FR), asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), private line or the public Internet. However, the routing algorithms and protocols of underlying IP and multiprotocol label switching (IP/MPLS) technology, coupled with ubiquitous access options (such as Carrier Ethernet, DSL and fiber), add a significant level of complexity.
For the IP VPN or Ethernet VPN service to be effective and operationally efficient and to support the varied applications used in modern business, communication service providers (CSPs) must be able to impose class-of-service policy, uphold quality of service (QoS), prioritize traffic, and simplify VPN network performance and service management. Now, enterprises demand more from their CSPs, as they struggle to manage massive application deployments, cloud services, BYOD and ballooning IT costs. To meet these demands, providers need a thorough understanding of their IP infrastructure, VPN services, associated end users, and committed levels of service, plus the ability to demonstrate these service levels to the enterprise customer.
InfoVista enables CSPs to deliver these network service level proof-points as well as the increasingly critical application visibility and performance component using flow and DPI- based data sourced from InfoVista’s 5View appliances, pre-built integrations with Cisco’s Application Visibility & Control (AVC) or Alcatel-Lucent’s 5670 Reporting and Analysis Manager (RAM) solutions.
InfoVista’s VistaInsight® for Networks enables service providers to manage and report on their network performance as well as their customers’ VPNs, empowering CSPs to identify and address problems across the backbone, aggregation and access networks before end users are affected. These same capabilities can be used to monitor network load against capacity and ensure sufficient bandwidth as well as the delivery of high quality, high availability services. An intuitive VPN performance management portal can be extended from the CSP to its enterprise customers to verify compliance with service-level agreements (SLAs), ensure appropriate class-of-service policies, confirm business application usage, and maintain the most efficient use of resources.
Key Features
VistaInsight® for Networks, InfoVista’s network performance management solution for VPN reporting, provides:
- An enterprise-class customer portal to verify IP MPLS network performance compliance with SLAs, ensure appropriate class-of-service policies, confirm business application usage, and maintain efficient use of subscribed resources
- Flexible QoS performance management and reporting to give operational staff an acute understanding of class-based policy enforcement and ensure customer traffic is delivered against committed service levels
- A complete view of a business service provider’s IP/MPLS network performance with the capability to monitor routers, interfaces, links, and paths, as well as link service performance to network performance, and vice-versa
- Real-time and historical visibility into network performance, network data, and service quality across multiple large-scale customers
- Optional, integrated application visibility services based on pre-built integrations with Cisco’s AVC, Alcatel-Lucent’s 5620 RAM or InfoVista’s own 5View appliances for flow and DPI-based application performance data
