Overview

A significant portion of service failures, provisioning problems and troubleshooting delays can be directly attributed to control plane mis-configuration, undetected routing topology changes and the lack of simple tools that could be used to understand the control plane’s impact on services. These operational inefficiencies lead to a number of business problems for service providers.

They make it difficult to provide more consistent service delivery quality. They impact the ability to offer stricter service level agreements (SLAs) that can differentiate service offerings. And they make it impossible to cost-effectively scale Internet protocol/multi-protocol label switching (IP/MPLS) opera- tions because network operators must rely on scarce IP routing experts to manually resolve Layer 2 and 3 service and MPLS infrastructure provisioning problems caused by the routing plane.

The Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager (CPAM) closes this gap in IP/MPLS manage- ment. It offers real-time control plane visualization, proactive control plane surveillance, configuration validation, and control plane diag- nosis. In addition, by seamlessly integrating with the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM), the 5650 CPAM provides simplified diagnosis and intuitive visualization of the relationship between services, the MPLS infra- structure and the routing plane.

2 Alcatel-Lucent 5650 Control Plane Assurance Manager