James Clayton, a Network Operations Centre (NOC) Analyst and part of the team responsible for managing Maintel’s monitoring solutions at its NOC office in Burnley, has been working with Highlight on the latest updates.
According to James: “The new service tiles are a great improvement and enable us to focus on averting potential outages. When tiles turn amber as a warning or red for critical, the team in our NOC can look at the Highlight wallboard to see, at a glance, the current state of all our data services.
“Highlight’s previous tiles had served us well for many years, but we wanted to help expand the monitoring to incorporate the latest managed service provider’s requirements. Most specifically, we wanted the tiles to be more intelligent and to detect Major Service Outages (MSO) whether at the high network level of individual service providers, through to the lower network level of individual customer solutions and locations. The new tiles represent a move away from looking at any long-standing issues that are already being worked on, to what is happening now in the last 2 hours with new intelligent notifications within the tile. It allows a user to see the proportion of recent issues against the total number.”
The new service tiles enable users like Maintel to customise the thresholds across all areas of the network to show potential issues at that moment in time, without including any long-standing problems. By hovering over a service tile, additional information shows the number of issues for each metric of stability, load and health.
James adds, “Highlight’s monitoring data gives us a holistic view across all our service providers, data centres, and local networks. Most of our customer now use unified communications solutions which incorporate services and applications that include video conferencing, instant messaging and VoIP calls. With Highlight’s monitoring, we can quickly pre-empt potential customer issues whether it be a physical disconnection on the network or a configuration issue with the routing, VLAN’s, etc. We can even detect application access issues that are external to Maintel and the customer’s network.”