Network Diagramming Channel Feature

NetMapper Takes the Hassle out of Network Diagrams for Norwegian Multiservice Provider

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

As any engineer will tell you, the more components there are in the system, the more points of potential failure. Networks, unfortunately, have lots of components.

This is the problem that Altibox faces. Altibox, a subsidiary of Lyse Energi, a Norwegian energy and telecommunication group, operates a dynamic and quickly growing network.

All Altibox services are provided on a multiservice IP network that consists of a Nordic IP/MPLS core and 36 metro areas, one for each regional partner that distributes Altibox’s products and services, according to a case study OPNET. The network changes almost daily, with thousands of new customers added every month.

With so many points of potential failure, Altibox helps manage the complexity and keep its services running efficiently by diagramming each network. Up-to-date network diagrams have proven an invaluable tool for troubleshooting outages and misconfigurations, as well as helping to quickly understanding configuration impact on customer service.

Keeping diagrams current is a challenging task, however. For Altibox, each network partner requires separate diagrams of their overall network, their data center, and their MPLS core.

Maintaining so many diagrams was too time-consuming, and Altibox found that the networks changed almost as fast as the company could diagram them.

This led Altibox to look for a better way, and the company found it in OPNET’s NetMapper. NetMapper automatically produces detailed, comprehensive, engineering-quality network diagrams in the popular Microsoft (News - Alert) Visio format. It incorporates physical and logical connectivity into the diagram as well.

“When our customers are trying to find the problem, they are literally looking for that proverbial needle in that hay stack,” Vinod Jeyachandran, vice president of Engineering, and product manager at OPNET, told TMCnet last year. “Every moment that they spend in isolating the problem, they are wasting money that they could have monetized.”

A picture says a thousand words, and to have that picture of the network draw automatically and accurately saves Altibox time and headache. It also keeps problems to a minimum.

 “NetMapper is the only solution that could address all our requirements”, Kent Sirevåg, senior network engineer at Altibox, noted in the case study. “It automatically discovers and collects detailed network configuration data to generate nightly diagrams and inventory reports.”

In addition, he added, “it gives us views we didn’t have before, such as combined layer 2 and layer 3 connectivity, as well as detailed routing and VLAN diagrams.”

For Altibox, this means saving both time and money—and, most importantly, keeping customers happy.