SAF Network Management System (NMS) is a feature-rich monitoring solution that allows you to overview your SAF microwave radio network. It helps you to detect and resolve network performance issues or degradation before it seriously impacts your network and potentially becomes noticeable to end users.
SAF NMS is a Microsoft Windows-based platform, which uses SNMPv1, SNMPv2c, SNMPv3 protocol versions to monitor radio equipment and processes received SNMPv1 and v2c traps. For the sake of convenience, it has several user interfaces, which allow staying up to date in all circumstances. Currently the most multifunctional and easy-to-use interface is SAF NMS Client with WEB GUI, however, historically the first was SAF NMS Client – Windows desktop application. We also have SAF NMS Mobile Client which is a notification-oriented Android application for 24/7 network monitoring that can be downloaded for free.
The helpful thing about starting to use SAF NMS is that you do not have to add each radio individually. Network Element (NE) Discovery tool scans the network of given management IP address and deploys all corresponding radios with the appropriate SNMP settings. Additionally, it automatically detects and visualizes radio link connections between radios. This procedure can be also assigned to the Auto-Discovery process, which requires similar (to Network Element Discovery) pre-configuration. The main difference is that Auto-Discovery scans the network periodically. If new network element has been found, it will be deployed in SAF NMS and monitored right after.
SAF NMS is completely adapted to SAF Tehnika equipment, with no need to manually interpret MIB file, as it offers fully predefined polling profiles and parameter descriptions, as well as predefined alarm threshold values (for example, Rx level, System temperature, Power supply voltage, etc.). No doubt that implemented integration can save a lot of time.
Fault management, of course, is the main purpose of SAF NMS, therefore, alarms have several indications:
- NE icon color changes according to the active alarm severity level. This simple method shows the overall status of the network at a glance and immediately indicates the affected NE that needs attention.
- Notifying logged-in user with a pop-up message and playing a notification sound.
- Sending an e-mail and/or SMS.
- Sending a notification to the Mobile Client app.
The synergy between instant notifications and a mobile application allows you to be aware of what is happening on your network, no matter where you are. Be the first to get alerted to active alarms, reached thresholds, other important network events, and radio failures. Sustain a strong sense of control over a business-critical microwave network environment.
It is also possible to create different user profiles and user groups, determining their access rights providing an advanced user and group management tool that sets explicit rights, configure options and defines access restrictions of regions and systems in the network structure tree (structure of containers where monitored network elements have been automatically deployed after the Discovery process). It is possible to configure these settings for an individual user or whole group at once.
Here is a Wikipedia page that you might find useful. Feel free to get in touch with me to learn more about SAF NMS and how it can help you with network monitoring.
- SNMP trap or polling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol
