Ixia SNMP Inline Probe – ISIP

Problem: Service Providers and System Integrators Cannot Always Manage Customer Premise Connectivity 

System Integrators (SI) and large service providers (SP) face a significant challenge when managing connectivity to client sites when they do not control the final mile infrastructure. This occurs with many System Integrators who do not own telecommunications infrastructure and with Service Providers who have to use alternative providers (who may even be competitors) for the final mile connectivity. This lack of control and resultant visibility prevents the SI/SP from:

• Offering proactive monitoring

• Speedily identifying the source of connectivity  problems and rapidly fixing them

• Understanding traffic levels

• Offering documented evidence of conformance  with agreed Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Solution: Increase Visibility of Final Mile Connectivity and Service Assurance Parameters Using ISIP

Ixia’s ISIP is a low cost, high performance device designed to be placed between a telecommunications provider copper termination point (be it a cable modem or NTU) and a customer’s firewall or router. With inbuilt ‘fail to wire’ capabilities any power failure of the device will not impact connectivity. “Self Discovery” of IP Address and auto configuration allows ISIP to be mailed to a client site and easily installed by non-technical staff, by simply inserting into a communications link and connecting to a power source. Self discovery takes less than 2 minutes. All communication to ISIP is via the network ports. There are no separate management interfaces. Only “trusted” source IP addresses can be used to communicate with ISIP.

Highlights:-

• Differentiate your managed services vs. competition

• Be proactive in monitoring key customer sites by using ISIP inbuilt heartbeats or SNMP polling

• Increase customer satisfaction through rapidly identify faults and fixing them by polling ISIP to determine link status

• Offer higher speed (and higher revenue) connectivity to customers through monitoring of traffic statistics

• Offer SLA performance statistics by polling traffic statistics or by using the inbuilt Hawkeye capabilities

• Offer Tier Services to end customers

• No additional ports or management interfaces required – purely inline

• IP address self discovery and configuration – removes the need for ‘truck roll’ to client site. No client site set up required

• Full integration with Hawkeye

• Fully secure standards based  SNMP management

• Inbuilt Fail to Wire does not degrade end user reliability 

ISIP has the following capabilities:-

Inline Real Traffic Monitoring:-

• Real time link status reporting – ISIP issues SNMP heartbeats which can be used to determine status  of the client connectivity. Frequency of heartbeats can be pre-configured.

• Status changes via SNMP traps – V2 and V3 SNMP supported for the notification of status changes.

• Traffic statistics – Full range of traffic statistics are available using SNMP GET commands or via the GUI.

• Heartbeats – ISIP issues SNMP heartbeats which can be used to determine status of the client  connectivity. Frequency of heartbeats can be pre-configured.