IRVING, TEXAS - GTE Network Services is offering a new frame relay monitoring package that lets customers keep an eye on whether the service provider is living up to its service-level promises.
GTE's FrameWatch service uses monitoring probes at each customer site to determine availability, delay and usage of virtual circuits between sites.
GTE presents this data to customers on a Web site that can be accessed via a browser. Customer reports are protected from prying eyes by digital certificates issued by GTE. The reports are updated twice per day with data that is collected every five minutes, GTE says.
That is an improvement over the standard GTE method of delivering performance reports - monthly and on paper - says Michaele Pollard, WAN administrator for Hillsborough County, Fla. She says the county's Information and Technologies Services Department now uses a managed GTE frame relay service. She is familiar with FrameWatch, but the county does not use it yet.
In addition to keeping an eye on how well GTE is doing, such reports could help plan growth of the Hillsborough network, Pollard says. If traffic increases on a given circuit, the size of that circuit can be increased before it gets congested. Or the reports might show that some connections have too much bandwidth for the traffic they bear. "You will have a good base of data to fall back on to know if your provisioning of circuits is OK," Pollard says. "Maybe you'll find that 256K bit/sec is overkill for one circuit."
Customers could buy the frame relay probes themselves and install them at each frame relay network site, but the service eliminates the need for customers to buy a centralized management platform to monitor the probes. Instead, GTE installs the probes and maintains them as well as gathers data for the reports.
The service reports on faults found with frame relay connections and on data delivery rates above and below the minimums guaranteed in service agreements. GTE uses FrameWatch Service Level Verifier System probes made by Paradyne, and they also give GTE a tool to diagnose problems in the GTE network when they arise.
FrameWatch service costs $60 per month, and the customer either buys or leases the probes. FrameWatch is available now.
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