Understanding Task Categories in Connectivity Services Director
Connectivity Services Director enables automated design and provisioning of VPN services such as E-Line services, E-LAN services, and IP services; label-switched path (LSP) services such as MPLS, RSVP, and static LSP services; configuration of QoS profiles; validation and monitoring of service performance; and management of synchronization.
Connectivity Services Director application enables you to easily discover, configure, monitor, and manage devices in large networks.
The Connectivity Services Director user application uses task-based workflows to help you accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently. The interface has five task categories that you can access from the application banner.
Task categories are not available in the Dashboard View and Topology View.
The task categories you can access are as follows:
Build —You use Build task category to discover the devices in your network, to create and manage device configurations, and to manage devices. You can also organize your devices into hierarchal groups based on logical relationships or physical locations. To support flexible, large-scale deployment of devices, the Build task category enables you to apply configurations across multiple devices grouped by logical relationships, physical locations, or type.
In Build mode, you can create services for devices that are managed by Connectivity Services Director. You can define service templates and attributes of different services, and also specify policies and filters to classify and control the manner in which packets are handled by various services. You can define E-Line services to provide transport and encapsulation of Layer 2 Ethernet circuits between two endpoints. You can also configure E-LAN service, which in turn provides multipoint-to-multipoint services and point-to-multipoint services, and Layer 3 virtual private network (VPN) functionality by using IP service, which supports full-mesh and hub-and-spoke services. The service designer is responsible for creating service definitions that a service provisioner uses to create a service order.
Deploy—The Deploy task category enables you to deploy service order configuration changes to devices. When you make configuration changes in Build task category, the changes are not deployed to devices automatically. You must manually deploy the changes to devices. Configuration changes are deployed to devices at the device level. When you deploy configuration changes to a device, all pending configuration changes for that device are deployed. You can do the following configuration deployment tasks on devices that have pending changes:
Run configuration deployment jobs immediately or schedule them for later.
Preview pending configuration changes before deploying the service settings to devices.
Validate that the pending changes are compatible with the device configuration.
Manage configuration deployment jobs.
Monitor —Monitor task category in Connectivity Services Director enables you to view your network status and performance. The Connectivity Services Director application monitors its managed services on devices and maintains the information it collects from the devices in a database. Monitor task category displays this information in graphs and in tables that you can sort and filter, allowing you to quickly visualize the state of your network, spot trends developing over time, and find important details. The main purpose of monitoring functionalities is to allow the operators to quickly monitor the health (working condition), operating efficiency, traffic-handling capacity, and performance status of the managed devices and configured services.
Fault—Fault task category in Connectivity Services Director enables you to view your network health. e. Fault task category displays alarms in graphs and in tables that you can sort and filter, enabling you to resolve system conditions that generate the alarms. When certain types of events are persistent, or when the condition causing the event crosses a threshold, SNMP sends a notification (also called a trap) to the Connectivity Services Director application. Connectivity Services Director application correlates traps, describing a condition, into an alarm. To assist in diagnosing network problems and the operating efficiency of devices, the task category shows you information about the health of your network and changing conditions of your equipment.
Note Starting in Release 2.0, the Report task category is disabled.