Watching the connections: To keep an IP network humming, look under the hood

More than ever, service providers and customers want to be able to watch their networks and their applications at work. The spread of Internet protocol for both networks and applications makes this possible; the growing importance of service-level agreements to large end users of dedicated lines and virtual private networks makes it crucial.

Internet benchmarking company Inverse Network Technology has revamped its former AccessRamp service management product, a data collection system for reporting on end user performance, and released the new version as IPInSight, adding several new functions that allow users to look at their IP networks in useful ways. Sold as a stand-alone product or as an entire turnkey service, IPInSight is scalable to large numbers of clients and can offer multiple views of the information it collects, depending on the user's needs.

Inverse's three years of Internet benchmarking helped when it came time to produce IPInSight, said Chris Roeckl, product manager. "One of our databases alone can handle reports from 8 million clients," he said. Last December, the systems took 3 billion call records in a single day, he said. "To do that on a Windows NT-based system requires a very tight data collection and aggregation model."

Service providers can bundle the IPInSight client with their dial-up software for remote access customers. The IPInSight software collects data and makes it available to service provider agents.

When a customer contacts the provider's help desk, the agent can get a Web-based history of that customer's connects over the last 60 days-successful connections, dedication failures, hardware failures and even wrong access numbers dialed.

"I've seen estimates that said as much as 30% of the revenue derived from an account goes into customer care," Roeckl said. "We're trying to help [Internet service providers] reduce those costs."

IBM and GTE Internetworking are two carriers that are using IPInSight.

"IBM's implementation of IPInSight was one of a number of actions that helped reduce our customer care costs by about 4% last year," said Sid Overbe, IBM's vice president for switched access and Internet service. "The ability to capture dial information from a user's perspective allowed us to focus on problems that affect our customers the most."

The network operational view strips away the user-specific information and gives a look at the whole network. Providers can respond to a help call by examining how many other users have been getting "ring-no answer" messages, allowing for proactive network management. They can also test the availability of specific applications-such as e-mail or domain name servers.

"IBM Global Network offers gold, silver and bronze dial-up networks," Roeckl said. "If you have their gold service, they give you a dialer that will fail over to a second area [point of presence] if the first one busies out. If that doesn't connect, it rolls over to an 800 number and IBM eats the cost of that."

In reporting on network operations, IPInSight counts that as two call failures and one success. But from the perspective of SLA performance, the call is reported as a success; it was connected, though it took a bit longer.

Benchmarking SLAs is a requirement if IP-based VPNs are to really take hold with corporate customers, said Jeff Alberis, marketing director for GTE Internetworking. "Corporations that use frame relay or dedicated lines for their private networking have been able to get security, visibility into operations and performance guarantees. If you can't offer them the same things over the IP backbone, you're in trouble. Our SLAs are recognized as some of the most robust in the business."

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