Firstwave Functional Capabilities - FCAPS

Firstwave Functional Capabilities

A summary of FCAPS functional capabilities of Firstwave products focused on Fault, Configuration and Performance management.

Fault Management

Capabilities

Comments

Fault poller: a ping or other protocol poller which results in an event being generated when a device fails to respond to a poll.

NMIS8

SNMP trap monitor: monitor and detect specific traps and generate an event.

NMIS8 logs and provides viewing and searching

opEvents monitors, and can filter, correlate, and do alerts, actions, etc.

Syslog monitor: monitor and detect specific syslog messages and generate an event.

NMIS8 logs and provides viewing and searching

opEvents monitors, and can filter, correlate, and do alerts, actions, etc.

Resource utilisation monitor: monitor various SNMP or other metrics and generate an event when a metric crosses a pre-defined threshold.

NMIS8

Resource health monitor: monitor resources status and generate an event for environmental exceptions, including power supply failure, redundant system failover, device temperatures, etc.

NMIS8

Event management: manage and correlate events to determine service impacting issues and raise an alert, incident, problem or some other action which can be handled by the Service Desk.

NMIS includes a very granular event policy system, which is what lots of people like. 

opEvents does everything else

Configuration Management

Capabilities

NMIS Comments

Network discovery: perform network discovery to find resources and then manage them or report them to be investigated (rogue devices).

Open-AudIT has subnet based discovery

Resource inventory management: collect inventory information from the data centre including all chassis, modules and their serial numbers.

NMIS8 collects for devices where available using SNMP

Open-AudIT collects using SNMP, CLI and WMI

Resource configuration collection and backup: collect resource configurations on a regular basis and keep an archive of several generations of configurations.

opConfig

Resource change detection: detect changes in a devices inventory and configuration and generate an event and stores information for reporting.

NMIS8, opConfig, Open-AudIT

Configuration reporting: provide search and reporting of the inventory and configuration as well as any detected changes in inventory or configuration of the resources.

opConfig, Open-AudIT

Configuration deployment: allow for creating and scheduling of configuration change to one or more resources.

opConfig Roadmap

Topology visualisation: provide network topology diagram of the devices which are included in the configuration management system.

opCharts (NMIS Enterprise)

Security configuration management: manage the security related configuration of a resource and ensures compliance with existing security policies.

opConfig Roadmap

Design compliance: provide a means to audit a resource configuration and inventory elements against a defined design policy. Make the information available for reporting.

opConfig

Security compliance: provide a means to audit a resource configuration and inventory elements against a defined security policy. Make the information available for reporting.

opConfig

Compliance reporting: provide reports on the status of resources compliance or non-compliance including which policies a resource is not compliant to.

opConfig

Performance Management

Capabilities

NMIS Comments

Historical interface polling: poll resources for interface statistics, and store the data for historical graphing and analysis.

NMIS8

Historical health polling: poll resources for CPU and memory statistics, and store the data for historical graphing and analysis.

NMIS8

Ad-hoc MIB polling: poll a resource for an SNMP MIB Object which can be defined on demand as required. This data is stored for historical graphing and analysis.

NMIS8

Performance thresholds: enable thresholding of collected performance data over defined time periods.

NMIS8

Reporting and graphing: make the historical data available for reporting and graphing, which can be generated for data over daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly intervals.

NMIS8, opReports

Synthetic application traffic monitoring: generate synthetic application traffic to simulate the end to end application to obtain performance data and objective end user experience information.

opSLA

Application monitoring: provide the ability to select which part of the infrastructure from which to “SPAN” or “TAP” and produce real-time monitoring of how much bandwidth each of the applications are using.

opFlow