The new grid view unpacks one or many locations into common constituent parts and displays them in underlay, overlay and LAN category column groups. These categories and services include ethernet, broadband or cellular underlay connectivity, MPLS private network or SD-WAN overlay, as well as switch and Wi-Fi LAN services.
By displaying the status of these components as a grid, users can see the status of all services at a location and how a problem with one service may be impacting another. Users can also scan down a column to see the status of common services over many locations that may have a common problem. The grid can also be configured to represent an entire customer as a row, enabling service providers to quickly check the status of many customer’s services at the same time.
Martin Saunders, product director at Highlight, explained, “Grid view is an extension of Highlight’s popular location tiles which were designed to provide a simple real time view of a network service at any given point in time. Grid view now caters for today’s more advanced customers that have multiple interdependent networking services at their premises. It also enables our partners to assure the best possible performance across all these services without complicating the view.
“If the user spots a problem in an SD-WAN tunnel, for example, they can instantly see if it is caused by the underlay broadband connection or if the issue is with the tunnel on its own. They can also check if other locations are having similar tunnel issues. This means it is easy to correlate what the cause of a problem might be, whether it is specific to the location, a tunnel or a combination of more than one issue.”
Gamma was one of the first users of the grid view feature. Jonathan Butcher, senior service advocate at Gamma, said, “The new grid view makes the complex simple and gives both us and our customers a fast and easy way to understand how their services are performing across all their locations. I can group all my customers with a single view for a high-level summary of all their services which helps me to identify any priority issues.
“When customers see the grid view, it displays all the service options that are available to them. This has already prompted a few discussions where customers ask if they can add new services such as cellular or Wi-Fi to their portfolios.”
Saunders added, “Another important use of grid view is when service providers are migrating customers to new networks. A provider with a customer running a legacy MPLS network that is migrating to SD-WAN can use the grid to ensure services are running effectively on both old and new networks side by side. The service provider can then migrate the customer smoothly to the new technology one connection at a time with full assurance that the technology is working and the transparency of the service isn’t impacted during the migration.”