Overview

A telecommunications service provider typically will offer a legal contract known as a service-level agreement (SLA) to its business customers. The terms of the SLA state that the service provider guarantees a measurable quality of service (QoS) to the customer. For example, an SLA may guarantee to a customer that the service will be available 99.999 percent of the time with a designated bit error rate (BER) within a monthly or annual time period. If the SLA guarantees are not met, the customer usually will receive a rebate. Thus there is a financial incentive for the service provider to manage and monitor the key performance parameters of the network very closely. The performance and operations management of a network requires the ability to configure and monitor network devices quickly and easily so that connections and services are always available. Early detection of changes in network status is critical in avoiding potential problems. This requires the use of sophisticated instruments and software-based diagnostic tools.

Thus, once the hardware and software elements of an optical network have been installed properly and integrated successfully, they need to be managed to ensure that the required level of network performance is met. In addition, the network devices must be monitored to verify that they are configured properly and to ensure that corporate policies regarding network use and security procedures are being followed. This is carried out through network management, which is a service that uses a variety of hardware and software...