PART 01 Project Background

01 Customer Profile

The customer in this case is a large comprehensive securities company in East China.

02 Pain Point Analysis

With the in-depth advancement of the digital transformation strategy, the scale of the customer’s IT infrastructure has expanded rapidly, and the complexity of application systems has increased significantly. At the same time, driven by the national IT Application Innovation Strategy, it is facing the dual challenges of digital transformation and IT application innovation transformation. Specific issues at the operation and maintenance level are as follows:

(I) Insufficient Monitoring and Alarm Capabilities

• Lack of monitoring for key equipment: For Cisco N-series devices, which are the core of the network, there is a lack of real-time monitoring methods for hardware status such as fans, power supplies, and temperature. Once a hardware abnormality occurs, it is difficult for operation and maintenance personnel to detect it in a timely manner, posing a risk of equipment downtime and potentially affecting the continuity of core businesses.

(II) Weak Report and Visualization Capabilities

• Difficulty in obtaining link data: Management needs to regularly grasp the operation status of network links, but there is a lack of automated statistical and analysis tools. Operation and maintenance personnel have to manually collect and organize data, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and the accuracy is difficult to guarantee. This cannot effectively support network optimization and management decision-making.
• Scattered operation and maintenance data: The dedicated line data of the original monitoring platform lacks a unified integration and display method. It is difficult for operation and maintenance personnel to comprehensively and intuitively grasp the operation status of the IT infrastructure, which is not conducive to quickly identifying problems and making operation and maintenance decisions.

(III) Imperfect Configuration Management Mechanism

• Lack of monitoring and reminders for configuration backup: There is no effective monitoring mechanism for the equipment configuration backup process. When backup fails or configuration differences occur, operation and maintenance personnel cannot be informed in a timely manner, resulting in risks of configuration loss or security vulnerabilities, and it is difficult to ensure the consistency and security of network configurations.

(IV) Low Level of Network Automated Operation and Maintenance

• Low efficiency and high error rate of manual inspection: The traditional manual scheduled inspection method requires operation and maintenance personnel to manually log in to the equipment to check logs and operation status. This is not only inefficient but also prone to omissions, making it impossible to fully and accurately identify problems existing in network equipment and difficult to meet the enterprise’s refined requirements for network operation and maintenance.
• Difficulty in executing batch operations: With the continuous increase in the number of enterprise network equipment, batch configuration and management tasks have become increasingly arduous. The existing operation and maintenance methods lack the function of automated batch operations. Operation and maintenance personnel need to operate each device one by one, which is time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to operational errors, failing to meet the operation and maintenance needs of large-scale network equipment.

PART 02 Lewei Solution

Based on the actual situation of the customer, Lewei transformed the customer’s operation and maintenance system through a two-phase implementation, replacing the network management product of a certain international vendor S and improving the intelligence level of operation and maintenance:

• Phase I: Complete the replacement of the IT Application Innovation network management system and adopt Lewei’s IT Application Innovation network management product.
• Phase II: Based on the achievements of Phase I, conduct in-depth optimization for actual operation and maintenance scenarios to comprehensively improve operation and maintenance efficiency and user experience.

01 In-depth Implementation of General Network Management Functions

• Link reports: On the basis of in-depth understanding of the customer’s needs for link data, and based on network monitoring data, data analysis tools and report development technologies are used to design and develop monthly report forms that meet the enterprise’s requirements, covering key indicators such as link traffic, bandwidth utilization, and number of faults.
• Monitoring script development: Technical personnel are organized to conduct in-depth research on the interfaces and protocols of Cisco N-series devices and develop targeted monitoring scripts. This script can collect real-time information such as device fan speed, power status, and temperature. Once abnormal data is detected, it will immediately send alarm notifications via email, SMS, and other methods.
• Configuration backup reminders: Add a difference detection and failure alarm module to the configuration backup system. When a failure occurs during the configuration backup process or configuration differences are detected, the system automatically triggers a notification mechanism, sends reminder information to designated operation and maintenance personnel, and records relevant logs for subsequent troubleshooting.

Visual large screen: Build a unified dedicated line data integration platform. The large screen displays the dedicated line status, alarm status, and top 10 performance statistics. With a map of China as the background, the large screen shows the dedicated line status between provinces and the dedicated line status of each administrative district in Shanghai.

02 Expansion and Implementation of Network Automation Functions

• Automatic inspection: Through the automatic inspection script, it automatically logs in to the network equipment, extracts log data from the past 3 months, analyzes and processes the logs in combination with preset rules and algorithms, and generates a detailed inspection report, including equipment operation status, potential risks, abnormal events, etc.

• Automatic jobs: Build an automated job platform that provides a user-friendly operation interface and a wealth of job templates. Operation and maintenance personnel can customize and write job scripts through the platform, set job execution time and target devices, and realize the scheduled distribution and execution of batch jobs. At the same time, the platform conducts real-time monitoring and recording of the job execution process to ensure the accuracy and reliability of job execution.

PART 03 Project Achievements

01 Monitoring Adaptation Template

The project plan improved the monitoring template for Cisco N-series devices, expanded the monitoring granularity and depth, enabling real-time monitoring of device hardware status such as fan speed, power status, and temperature. The timeliness of alarms has been significantly improved, the time for detecting and handling abnormal events has been greatly shortened, and the probability of network failures has been effectively reduced.

02 Configuration Backup Reminder

The implementation of the configuration backup reminder function allows operation and maintenance personnel to be promptly informed of configuration abnormalities. Since the function was launched, it can automatically remind users of configuration backup failures and configuration difference events, and operation and maintenance personnel have handled them in a timely manner, ensuring the normal execution of configuration backups and improving the security and stability of network device configurations.

03 Large Screen Visualization

The operation and maintenance visualization large screen provides the enterprise with a window to intuitively display the operation status of the IT infrastructure. Through the large screen, managers can real-time understand the overall network operation status, key performance indicators, and alarm information, facilitating quick decision-making. At the same time, the large screen has also become an important tool to demonstrate the effectiveness of operation and maintenance, enhancing the work value and influence of the operation and maintenance team.

04 Benefits of Automatic Inspection Function and Automatic Job Function

The automatic inspection function has replaced the traditional manual scheduled inspection, increasing the inspection efficiency by at least 300%, and the accuracy has also been greatly improved. Through the automatic job function, operation and maintenance personnel can quickly execute scripts in batches. Batch operations that originally took hours or even days to complete can now be finished in only half an hour to an hour, which greatly improves the operation and maintenance efficiency and reduces the operation and maintenance costs.

PART 04 Customer Benefits

This solution has in-depth analyzed the customer’s pain points in the management and maintenance of basic information. Through detailed design and planning, a set of operation and maintenance monitoring and management system with excellent performance, powerful functions, wide monitoring coverage, and flexibility has been established. The customer’s network operation and maintenance efficiency, reliability, and visualization level have been significantly improved, and the expected benefit goals have been achieved:

• Comprehensive monitoring to ensure business stability: Realized a deeper monitoring granularity of information infrastructure and full perception of resource status, becoming a strong support for the stable operation of the customer’s business.
• Intelligent inspection to improve operation and maintenance efficiency: Abandoned the previous working mode of “logging in to each device one by one for operation”, realized automatic scheduled inspection and automatic report output, and the inspection efficiency has been increased by at least 300%.
• Reduce costs and enhance system stability: Effectively reduced the work complexity of operation and maintenance personnel, reduced the daily maintenance cost of information systems, and greatly ensured the stability of business systems.