Network discovery and inventory reconsiliation

NETvisor's NETsync is network discovery and inventory reconciliation application that enables telco providers and ISPs to consolidate their inventory system. Inventory systems are usually maintained manually, which leads to discrepancies over a long time. An out of synch inventory system leads to unused capacities in the network, and makes planning and configuration automation a very fragile process. The common solution is it to rediscover the whole network manually, which is a very expensive and time consuming task. Also it doesn't solve the origin of the problem:  networks are not static and changes cannot be followed accurately by manual processes. Only an automated solution can solve this problem.

Discovery and Reconciliation

NETsynch keeps the inventory system up to date as possible. It discovers the resources in the network automatically and reconciles them with the inventory system. The reconciliation process takes into account:

• The dependencies between the different discrepancies in the same technology domain.
• The dependencies between the different dependencies in different technology domains and layers (SDH, ATM, Ethernet, IP)

For every resource where discrepancy is detected between the network data and the inventory data a discrepancy report item is generated. Discrepancy report items and their dependencies can be accessed even as the reconciliation process takes place. For a single discrepancy report item the whole dependency hierarchy can be viewed for both directions:

• The discrepancies that should be fixed before this discrepancy item can be fixed.
• The discrepancies that can be fixed only if this discrepancy item is fixed.

The following actions can be executed on a discrepancy report item:

• It can be deleted manually, which also deletes depending report items.
• It can be applied manually if the Inventory System Connector supports the bidirectional mode.
• It can be applied automatically if the Inventory System Connector supports the bidirectional mode. Automatic execution is based on predefined conditions.

Main Components

  NETsynch Discovery Engine:

The discovery engine collects data from the network using different vendor specific collectors. Different collectors discover different layers and technology domains of the network, creating a top-bottom end-to-end view of the network.

• All of the collectors work independently and can be scheduled to different schedules.
• The collectors can be installed on different remote machines.
• New collectors can be created using the NETsynch Collector Framework.

  NETsynch Reconciliation Engine:

The reconciliation engine accepts the data from the discovery engine. Using the inventory system connector it compares the data from the network with the data from inventory system. For every network object (shelf, card, circuit) a discrepancy report item is created.

  Inventory System Connector:

The inventory system connector connects the reconciliation engine to the customer's inventory system. A connector can be unidirectional or bidirectional. The later one allows applying discrepancy report item from the NETsynch system accelerating the reconciliation of the inventory system and avoiding time consuming manual data entry.

  Web based GUI:

Clean and ergonomic web based GUI for the easy use of the application.

The GUI is based on the emerging AJAX technology that enables creating web based GUIs with rich client features and without the disadvantages of the current web technologies.

The GUI has a fine-grained multi-level role-based authorization system. Operator authentication and authorization can be configured through an LDAP server.