EzEMS – The Hyper-intuitive Element Management System

As the name suggests EzEMS is a highly intuitive and easy to use Element Management Systems designed and developed by Nivetti. EzEMS is the only Element Management System in the market that provides complete support for the entire life cycle management of a network starting from Design, Deployment to Maintenance phase. EzEMS offers the flexibility of both cloud and local installation. Cloud installation of EzEMS offers a single dashboard on browser to the System Integrators for offering Managed IT services to organizations whereas local installation enables IT teams to manage their network infrastructure internally.

Network Design Stage

In any network, a router or a switch plays a specific role, for example a router can be a core router, aggregation router, access or an edge router, similarly a switch can be access, distribution or a core switch. Network devices which are playing a specific role share majority of configurations (almost 80%) except device specific configurations which only form 20% of the overall configuration required. Which implies that 80% of configuration can be templetized to be replicated across devices to reduce the overhead of detailed configurations. The Network Design stage of EzEMS allows for defining Device role and associated configuration templates. Device role are configurable and designer has the flexibility to define device roles based on his organizational and network requirements.

This utilizes the underlying smart configuration design of NiOS Network OS which runs on Nivetti’s routers and switches.

Network Deployment Stage

This is the stage where the administrator actually starts deploying the devices and configuring them. At this stage admin just selects the role of the device while adding the device to EzEMS, this automatically pulls in all the templates configured to fill in 80% of configuration, leaving very minimal configuration to be done per device. Another advantage of this is that this drastically reduced the chances of any network level misconfigurations as all network level details are auto populated.

Above covers the green field deployment scenarios where a network has been build from scratch, however EzEMS provides this support for already deployed networks also. The reverse sync and validate feature of EzEMS pulls the configurations from the already deployed devices and highlights any discrepancies against the network level templates. This allows EzEMS to be inducted at any stage of network deployment. The reverse sync feature also allows for user to change configurations through CLI or any other mechanisms and then sync them with EzEMS DB for centralized management.

Network Maintenance Stage

This stage of EzEMS is designed keeping in mind three fundamental requirements:

1. Reduce the need for highly skilled personnel to do day to day tasks
2. Reduce/eliminate issues arising from manual errors in configuration
3. Automate repetitive tasks to reduce cost and effort

At maintenance stage, EzEMS allows for creation of custom tasks flow which are driven by day to day business operations and needs to the user. These custom task flows are set of guided steps which lead a user through required configuration change without the need for him to learn the entire system. This means that a new personal can be trained on these in minutes to start executing these tasks flawlessly.  EzEMS comes with a library of predefined flows to give users a kick start into building their own custom flows.
We find that in most of the networks there are some day to day tasks which  are completely repetitive in nature. EzEMS flow automation module allows for automating such flows by creating custom, fully defined flows which can be linked to a time trigger or a network event trigger. This can save a lot in terms of manual effort involved in executing such tasks,  cost savings and guaranteed/timely execution being an implicit advantage.