LWH Technologies - Alternative Energy, IT, and Business Solutions

Powerful and Tightly Integrated Solutions for Your Network Operations Center

••• No other network management system offers as many standard, emergent, and legacy network protocols out of the box! •••

Your company is expanding geographically and you need a cost effective network management platform as the core of your network operations center (NOC). Or maybe your existing network management platform is getting old, outdated, and tired. ArTrac G5 (Generation 5) offers all of the solutions you need to run your NOC. From the local market to a regional center up to a national NOC, ArTrac G5 provides a powerful and consistent set of tools at all levels.

ArTrac G5’s design is a true distributed architecture, meaning that you can place processing power where you need it and expand throughput capacity incrementally where and when you need to. The concepts of a distributed architecture significantly reduce both capital cost and long term cost of ownership as compared to the centralized monolithic design of most of our competitors. It also allows for a tremendous range of scalability. Whether you need to manage a single market or thousands of markets, a thousand network elements or hundreds of thousands, ten users or thousands of users, ArTrac G5 can be scaled to meet your needs at minimal cost.

Are you concerned about how to integrate site information management, facility information management, inventory management, incident management and trouble ticketing, document management, management quality reporting, data management, human and resource scheduling, workflow management, on line libraries, and more with your network management system? Worry no more. ArTrac G5 offers all of these as tightly integrated and highly customizable modules - many of them included in the base system. All admin and user screens are 100% web browser based. Mobile tablets and smart phones are well supported. All major browsers are likewise supported. Access your ArTrac G5 screens from anywhere in the world.

Here is a short list of the many modules offered by ArTrac G5:

• • Fault Management Suite - Monitor your diverse and homogeneous network elements with powerful root cause analysis and soft fault detection.
• • Site Book - a comprehensive site information management system.
• • Facility Book - a hierarchal circuit information management system.¹
• • ITIL Compliant Ticketing - Fast track MTTR, manage workflow, scheduled maintenance, and prioritize repair efforts.¹
• • Multi-resource Scheduler (included with ticketing) - Schedule multiple resources, maintenance procedures, customer appointments, travel, and more. Automatically open and assign tickets for tracking.¹
• • Document Management System - Organize and manage documents and have them at your fingertips.
• • Data Management System - Intelligently gather, aggregate, restructure, and move data with ease.
• • Management Reporting Suite - Automatically produce and deliver stunning reports on network faults, trouble tickets, network performance, and more.¹
• • Inventory - Track customer, site, fleet, and warehouse inventory.
• • Barcode Central - scan items in and out of inventory. Move items from warehouse to fleet to site effortlessly.¹
• • On-Line Library - have all of your equipment manuals instantly on-hand no matter where you are.
• • Trend Analysis Server - using intelligent time series modeling, spot anomalies in network performance in real time before they affect customers.¹

Seamless Integration - All of the above modules are tightly integrated and interoperable. For example, when the Fault Management Suite detects a critical alarm, it can automatically open and assign an incident ticket, send alerts to management, customer service, and responsible engineers and technicians. Site, circuit and inventory information is automatically attached to the ticket. Additionally, each ticket has its own virtual document management system to exchange floor plans, equipment manuals, photographs, spreadsheets, and other documents related to the ticket.

Intelligent Work Flow - The multi-resource Scheduler can also open request tickets, track them, send reminders before a scheduled event as well as track the progress of request tickets. A powerful notification engine makes sure that everyone is kept informed of changes in schedules. Like incident tickets, if a scheduled event is site specific, site information, circuit information and inventory are automatically attached to the ticket.

High Availability - ArTrac G5 employs state of art self healing software intelligence for unparalleled up-time and availability. Fault tolerant and geographically isolated disaster tolerant hot fail-over configurations are available.

Highly Scalable - ArTrac G5 scales and fits any budget from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. It can start small and grow as your business grows. For small mom and pop businesses and start up businesses, ArTrac G5 Lite is available for free with no catches!

Secure - ArTrac G5 is SOX, HIPAA, and PCI security compliant.

Auto Learning - Most competitor's systems can automatically discover SNMP devices in your network. ArTrac G5 can do that as well. Additionally, using intelligent rules, it can automatically learn any new network element added to your network regardless of the protocol. This is especially useful for large switching systems with many nodes of network elements that are constantly being added. Create a rule for one network element type and that rule will be automatically applied to all existing and newly added network elements.

Advanced SNMP Polling - Our competitors poll SNMP devices by frequency only. ArTrac G5 has the most advanced SNMP polling features in the industry. In addition to polling by frequency, ArTrac G5 can poll based upon time of day (TOD) and even astronomical time. It can use the latitude and longitude of the network element to calculate sunrise and sunset anywhere in the world. Astronomical time is especially useful for polling tower light controllers just after sunset to make sure they're working and just after sunrise to make sure the lights have been disabled (to ensure maximum lifespan of the bulbs). Of course, there's many more cases where polling by astronomical time can be an important feature. All TOD and astronomical based polling support time zone and time offset adjustments.

Support for Dynamic DNS - For companies using satellite links where dedicated IP addresses are either very expensive or unavailable, ArTrac G5 supports rDNS lookup. Using the rDNS protocol, ArTrac G5 can detect when the dynamic IP address of a network element changes and instantly look-up the newly assigned IP address of the network element, thereby maintaining constant monitoring of devices with dynamic IP addresses. No other network management system supports this feature.

Northbound and Southbound Interfaces - Do you need to tightly integrate your network management with other systems in your environment? ArTrac G5 supports many different industry APIs and provides a Northbound interface that supports TCP/IP with several message structures for flexibility. It also supports SNMP Versions 1, 2C, 3 forwarding of events to Northbound systems. ArTrac G5 also supports Southbound interfaces in the role of a Manager of Managers.

Intelligent Notification - If you don't need to run a NOC 24/7 and want to assign on-call responsibilities at night, weekends, or holidays, ArTrac G5 knows who is responsible for which network elements at any given time of day. It supports shifts, rotations, orbits, and even substitutions. It can contact responsible personnel via email notifications and SMS. Delays can be created that allow network elements to recover before notifying on-call personnel. Severity, quality quotient, and count based rules can also be created to prevent notifying on-call personnel about nuisance and unimportant alarms.

Unprecedented Extensibility - ArTrac G5 is highly extensible - far more than any of our competitors. It understands complex hierarchal relationships between network elements. For very special or complex relationships, ArTrac G5 is the only network management platform that supports JIT (Just In Time) compiled custom assemblies. A custom assembly is a source code file that ArTrac G5 compiles and includes in the analysis path of event processing. The custom assembly can perform any additional analysis and processing required to recognize and understand very complex event relationships. Custom assemblies can also communicate with 3rd party APIs. Best of all, you can create custom assemblies yourself.

Broad Emergent and Legacy Protocol Support - Finally, ArTrac G5 comes with the most protocol support out of the box compared to our competitors. If you have a device that can communicate its status in any way, ArTrac G5 can monitor it. If it is something we've never seen before, our in-house engineers will come up with a solution to monitor it.

ArTrac G5 Supports the following network protocols:

• • SNMP Discovery - Automatically discover all of the network elements in your diverse network.
• • SNMP Polling - Versions 1, 2C, and 3. Polling by interval, time of day and even astronomical time. Time zone and relative time offsets supported.
• • SNMP Traps and Notifications - Versions 1, 2C and 3
• • WMI Polling - monitor disk capacity, CPU performance, memory, and processes in mission critical servers and WMI enabled network devices.
• • Web Services Polling - monitor key indicators and states in web services.²
• • NetFlow® Collector - Versions 5, 9 and 10 - Capture and store NetFlow network performance data for analysis.
• • IPFIX Collector (NetFlow Version 10) - Capture and store IPFIX network performance data for analysis.
• • JFlow® Collector - Capture and store JFlow network performance data for analysis.
• • UDP/IP - monitor UDP datagrams from network elements that report status via the UDP protocol.
• • SyslogD - monitor security equipment, and other network elements that report status via the SyslogD protocol.
• • SOAP - monitor switches, soft switches, and brokering platforms that report status via Simple Object Access Protocol (HTTPS supported).
• • XML over HTTP or HTTPS - monitor XML structured messages across HTTP and HTTPS protocols.
• • ICMP Poller - tests for network element availability, correct routing, and round-trip network latency.
• • HTTP Poller - tests for web site availability and response times.
• • MQTT (IoT) - monitor MQTT based industrial / environmental controls and sensors. Fully compliant with version 3.1.0, 3.1.1, and the newly emergent version 5.0.0, supporting all QoS levels.^1,2
• • Oracle® ODP data connector - query Oracle® databases.
• • MS SQL® ADO data connector - query Microsoft® databases.
• • PostGreSQL® data connector - query PostGreSQL® databases.
• • ODBC data connector - query any other database with ODBC integration
• • BNSI - a full implementation of the ITU-T X.736 Series X recommendations for Data Networks and Open System Communications. This protocol is supported by many 3GPP switching systems, including L.M. Ericsson cellular switches.
• • Raw Sockets Host and Client - monitor events in network elements that have simple TCP/IP interfaces.
• • Telnet Host and Client - monitor legacy network elements that communicate their status via Telnet connections (all major device emulations supported)
• • Telnet (Nokia® implementation) Host and Client - Monitor Nokia switches and network elements that implement the proprietary Nokia version of Telnet.
• • SSH Host and Client - Monitor Linux, UNIX, and other network elements that communicate their status using the Secure SHell cryptographic network protocol.
• • LDAP / Active Directory support - import and manage users via the LDAP protocol.
• • FTP - download and analyze data files at specific times of day or frequency.
• • TL-1 Request and Response - suitable for monitoring SCADA and other telemetry systems.
• • MCI API interface to exchange information with Mapcom's MC4® Managment Platform.¹
• • Form C contact, door sensors, voltage, current, moisture, temperature, and other environmental monitoring.¹
• • 3rd Party protocol and brokering application integration fully supported.

Is there something you need that’s not in the lists above? Chances are we have what you need, or can recommend a tested 3rd party product, or can custom build it to your exact requirements. Ask us in the request form below.

1 = Optional feature/module cost.
2 = Available in next release (free to ArTrac G5 systems under a current support contract)
NOTE: All protocols listed above are available in the Remote Connection Manager.