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End-to-End Network Management |
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The AFCS Forum has recently published papers on the use of AFM in conducting maintenance and troubleshooting operations in fiber facilities.
Facility operations managers are responsible for managing large networks, across many locations. These locations include large facilities in urban areas with dedicated on-site staff as well as remote locations in rural areas, far from any technician. Provisioning, maintenance, and management activities involve complex task coordination across multiple locations, and a lot of truck rolls.
FiberZone AFM enables end-to-end management from the network operations center (NOC): visibility and control, provisioning, inventory management, and test, troubleshooting and maintenance.
Rather than consulting wall maps to perform planning activities, managers can view the network from within the network management software (NMS) or from any web browser.
AFM allows new links to be provisioned, end-to-end, from the NOC. Today, setting up a new circuit involves coordination across multiple locations to perform link testing, port identification and availability, and manual connection. With AFM, the entire process can be completed from the NMS.
Inventory management is a major burden and source of error today. Technicians manually enter port connections into Excel spreadsheets, which are later consulted during testing and provisioning operations. Manual entry costs valuable technician time, and results in the permanent storage of data entry errors in the database. AFM synchronizes actual port connections with the database, ensuring consistency and allowing network managers to view each individual link.
Maintenance activities in today’s network require truck rolls; highly-skilled, expensive technicians; and the deployment of costly test equipment throughout the network. With FiberZone AFM and
value-added modules , test equipment can be deployed in central locations and made available across a wide geography by connecting to AFM systems in remote locations. When maintenance and troubleshooting activities are required, the manager can connect to the appropriate equipment from the NOC, eliminating the truck roll.
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