Framing service levels: Kaspia uses frame relay to help verify SLAs

Managers of frame relay networks have a new tool to help them study performance, monitor usage and pinpoint problems.

Kaspia Systems, based in Beaverton, Ore., has released a packaged solution expressly targeting the frame relay market. The Frame Relay Audit System helps carriers make better capacity planning and fund allocation decisions and helps end users verify that they are getting what they pay for in their service level agreements (SLAs).

The system monitors frame relay performance over time, automatically correlating all relevant data and presenting a historical perspective and trending analysis through a World Wide Web-based interface. This paints an accurate picture of the current performance of service managers' frame relay networks, allowing them to better plan for network growth and shifts in usage.

The system tracks frame relay traffic, analyzes different pipes and tracks actual performance and usage of frame relay circuits against the committed information rate designated in the SLA between the business and its service provider.

The system can detect performance and growth trends that help define future capacity planning and timing of additional investments in frame relay circuits, and it presents these trends in the form of automatically generated reports, called grade-of-service tables. The tables use a percentage scale, with categories including use, congestion, circuit loss, and mean time between failures. Network and service managers can change the percentage weight of each category to reflect the importance each category has for an individual customer.

Unlike other solutions, Kaspia's approach eliminates the need for various CSUs or DSUs to collect data.

Direct point-to-point connections between Data Link Circuit Identifiers are audited, allowing network administrators to see exactly what is happening and where it happens in the transparent frame relay cloud. The system uses standard MIBS to collect information and build a complete picture of any frame relay network regardless of whose hardware is in place, said Jeff Erwin, president and chief executive officer of Kaspia.

The system marks a new strategy for Kaspia, said Erwin. "In the past, we found that our auditing technology did so many things that our customers couldn't pinpoint exactly what their uses of it would be," he said. "We found that customers would focus on one piece of the system and ignore the rest, so we decided to follow the view of the customers."

That view allowed Kaspia to specialize in frame relay, which the company considers the ripest market for such a solution.

Although frame relay is a cost-effective means of providing digital wide area network transmissions to worldwide users, it can still cost tens of thousands of dollars a month, making it vital that companies purchase the optimal amount of bandwidth to handle their network traffic and ensure that failures or non-optimal use of frame relay circuits are minimized.

"There's a genuine need for an out-of-the-box method of calculating the grade of service," said Erwin. "Carriers are getting blasted by customers for the prices they charge for these services, and they need to make sure that they're living up to their service level agreements."

The company's next attempt to package its solution will focus on virtual private networks (VPNs), an environment that shares many characteristics of frame relay, although no time frame has been set for a VPN product, Erwin said.