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The service provider alternative

By Elisabeth Horwitt
Network World, 04/03/00

Don't feel up to doing your own service-level monitoring, but still want more than the average carrier report provides? There are several options to check out.

Companies like Bell Atlantic Data Solutions Group, Lucent subsidiary Network Care, and Manage.com will monitor service levels on your WAN circuits, deliver reports, interpret the results and go to bat for you with the carrier.

Of course, your carrier may not agree with their numbers. Kelly Brown, a product manager at UUNET in Fairfax, Va., says her firm works with the third-party companies its customers contract with to make sure they're testing in the right light. In most cases, those companies are willing to work with UUNET.

A second choice for companies that don't want to do their own service-level monitoring is to ask the carrier if it offers a premium service-level reporting service. All the major interexchange carriers, and a growing number of service providers, do - for a fee, of course.

MCI, for example, recently announced Circuit View, a service where it deploys Visual Network Visual UpTime CSU/DSU probes on the edge of a customer's network. MCI provides 60 different reports that customers can access any time, according to Chris Van Luling, MCI's director of advanced network services in Clinton, Miss. Circuit View costs $20 to $35 per location per month. AT&T and Sprint use CSU/DSU probes from Lucent, Paradyne and Visual UpTime to provide similar premium service-level reporting services for their frame relay and ATM networks, in a similar price range.

Managed network service provider Convergent offers a WAN service-level monitoring service based on Lucent's VitalSuite. Rates start at $25 per month per circuit for basic frame relay PVC fault management between CSU/DSUs. Customers have 24-7 browser-based access to real-time or historical service-level data via the Web. Other optional features include configuration of frame relay PVCs and routers, and service-level monitoring of customers' LAN and backbone routers for an additional fee, a Convergent spokeswoman says.

At this point, premium service-level reporting is available primarily for managed ATM and frame relay services, in which the service provider takes responsibility for end-to-end service between your WAN equipment. In order for carriers to have the same kind of real-time, detailed monitoring on public data and voice services, "The monitoring technologies need to grow up to carrier strength, so that they can be used across thousands of enterprise networks," MCI's Van Luling says.

Perhaps not surprisingly, customers that turn their networks over to a managed service provider still want to be able to look over the provider's shoulder.

Ernst & Young, for example, trusts Sprint to manage its ATM network connections and equipment, but still uses Concord's Network Health to collect statistics on network performance and rolls them up into a predictive application health model, says Bob Uhl, the New York professional service provider's director of network technologies.

"We don't rely entirely on the carrier's reports. Network Health gives us a lot of information for capacity planning we wouldn't normally get from a carrier, like intermittent problems with calculated utilization projections on a router's buffer space," Uhl says.

Horwitt is a freelance writer and consultant in Waban, Mass. She can be reached at ehorwitt@world.std.com .

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