Optical transport systems vendor ECI has added a network maintenance app, LightCARE, to its LightAPPS family of applications for software-defined networking.
LightCARE continuously and proactively monitors the health of the network to pre-empt potential failures and avoid network downtime. This, in turn, increases customer satisfaction and loyalty, which are both important to any business.
The app regularly runs a variety of tests, in the background, that identify and analyse potential network issues. It displays a comprehensive summary of the health status of the network in an intuitive dashboard. The summary includes maintenance recommendations and alerts only on the most urgent and critical issues, graded by severity. The report is constantly updated and always available for review.
“The beauty of LightCARE is that it is always on the job, looking after the health of your network. It alerts when there is a failure looming in order to pre-empt potentially problematic situations before they develop and impair network availability and performance. This enables operators to discover, prioritise and focus their efforts on the most important and timely concerns,” explained Gali Malkiel, head of software business at ECI.
Automated health tests can be tailored to the user’s requirements and added to the app as required using predefined templates. Operators can schedule specific tests – including NE backup status, RDR backup status, disk and memory usage, and CPU load – and arrange for alerts to be delivered via e-mail or SMS.
“In short, LightCARE helps operators reduce opex by introducing automation to day-to-day operations. This is yet another step on the path to a truly, self-maintained network,” said Malkiel.