hi my name is Kevin wilamowski I'm a senior outbound product manager in the Telecom media and Technology Group at service now and today I'd like to take you through an overview and a demo of the Telecommunications Network inventory product today's presentation may contain some forward-looking statements and may show some features that are future planning uh if that's the case we uh strongly uh suggest that any purchase decisions on this product be made based on what is current currently available in in the product so service now worked with AT&T to Cod develop the network inventory product um and as John Summers the senior vice president of uh information technology and the CIO at uh AT&T says uh working with service now to develop the network inventory product was a great collaboration to create a tool that could help us address an industrywide challenge so what we're hearing from our customers today is that uh there's unprecedented demand for digital first customized services and this is primarily driven by 5G we're hearing that there are a lot of archaic systems and labor intensive processes that are still out there and that's inhibiting uh the ability to automate um across the life cycle as well as uh limit the ability to invest uh in optimization there are out of sync inventory systems and that leads to inaccurate and untrust data uh and finally we're also hearing that uh the disconnects between the resources and services leads to slow and frustrating delivery and uh unhappy customers so with new technologies partners and complex business strategies csp's operations are becoming increasingly more disjointed and complex to manage operational processes span organizational silos and demand visibility into Data distributed across multip multiple organizational teams partners and systems in addition to the multitude of people and organizations involved a fragmented systems landscape and distributed data ownership vastly complicate processes to launch and deliver new Services support customers and assure networks and services let's look an example of a typical customer support process involving a trouble ticket customer support teams must interact with the technical support teams across multiple systems with limited to no visibility into the network which is challenging to resolve customer issues on the other hand technical support teams can only connect the network with the customer after costly and air prone Integrations that are difficult to deploy and maintain these complexities introduce inefficiencies across teams and systems that directly and indirectly increase the cost to operate and support customers cat scores are directly impacted due to delays and resolving issues and the lack of visibility and transparency into key customer customer data csps must respond to rapidly changing Market demands to launch deliver operate and support new Services build new processes or update existing processes on top of already complex Legacy systems keeping up with ongoing customer demands adds another layer of complexity to updating or maintaining their current operations that cause a cyclical effect of reducing efficiencies and increasing costs with service now csps are transforming the way they operate by streamlining task assignments providing data visibility across organizations eliminating costly and error prone Integrations and enabling technical teams to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions by centralizing Network and service topology in the cmdb both customer service agents and network operators can access consistent relevant and updated network data with both organizations working on the same platform visibility to relevant data and execution of cross organizational processes becomes seamless money typically spent on costly deployment and maintenance to integrate systems can instead be spent on streamlining operations to deliver exceptional customer experiences with product service and resource data residing on the same platform as product inventory and the cmdb attending to customer requests and issues is no longer a time-consuming multi-stem process when Market conditions change service now's no low code and workflow automation capabilities enable the business to initiate and execute sophisticated process changes without costly timeconsuming multi-d development life cycle processes for example if a newly launched premium service requires an additional layer of Agents service now administrators can easily add an additional workflow step and have the change take effect immediately the results become apparent in Rising cat and NPS metrics so taking a look at the Telco products from service now in this diagram uh let's focus on starting from the left Network inventory so Network inventory is the product where we would be doing the planning and the building of your network once that Planning and Building is done the next stage would be to dispatch field uh technicians to the right sites with the right equipment and the right skills to get that equipment installed and up and running the next one would be order management so now that you've got the the network built out now you're ready to start receiving orders for customers so order management allows you to capture the orders from the customers and decompose those into the products and the services and the resources supporting those orders on day two once the service is up and running now you're managing that service and you're managing the customer and the services that they're provisioned and the network that's supporting them all of those are being managed through our Telco service management product and then from a service Assurance standpoint our service operations management module allows you to correlate incidents and alarms with the services that are being supported and the resources supporting those Services the Telecom Network inventory capabilities so if we take a look at this diagram this will give us a better idea of what exact Telecom Network inventory is and perhaps What It Isn't So starting at the bottom there's different domains that get supported by this network inventory product uh you'll see mobile Wireline core all of these domains are supported any domain per uh any domain is actually supported by the uh the TNI data model uh that's because the TNI data model is built on the cmdb the cmdb has classes that were introduced for specific technology and equipment types that can be leveraged by the Telecom Network inventory product so the types of inventory that we keep in TNI if we take a look at the second layer of this diagram let's start with physical and the virtual inventory so physical would be your your actual physical equipment your cards uh your your patch panels connecting devices together that's your physical inventory your logical inventory would be more of your representation of an end to end uh uh Service uh or circuit path so going through multiple different sites multiple pieces of equipment that kind of inventory is obviously captured as part of TNI as well as the virtual inventory and the service inventory so virtual inventory might be uh virtualized Network functions so you could have virtual routers virtual firewalls that virtual inventory is also stored in the cmdb and leveraged by TNI and then the services that you provide to your customers that get provisioned over your network work that service inventory is maintained in TNI as well equipment templates are used uh and Equipment templates are in used in conjunction with inventory templates uh or inventory models I should say and inventory models extend from the hardware model so we use a combination of models to represent equipment and then templates to represent the instantiation of the actual equipment at a network site and those templates reference the models from a circuit design and assign standpoint that's native capability that comes with he and so we have outof the-box workflows that you can leverage right away uh to start creating circuits both physical and logical connections uh we've got the ability to have path computation uh as well as some additional design and assign capabilities that will be coming in the future so essentially being able to build out a circuit from one site to another and then uh compute the appropriate path to get there through your network Rackspace management uh we have the uh in a in a release coming up soon this will be our Washington release um which is as of this recording scheduled to release in one month uh in February of 2024 and that release will include some updated visualizations including the ability to visualize both the front and back of equipment racks uh planning and capacity management is is a key part of the of the platform so the ability uh initially to to calculate um slot availability how many slots do I have occupied how many are available how many cards are in those how many ports are available on those cards that kind of planning and capacity management is natively part of the uh TNA application Asset Management so TNI comes as part of actually TNI is uh includes Hardware Asset Management um so TNI is built on the hardware Asset Management platform and as such um TNI leverages the workflows for ham uh so that allows your engineers who are doing the Planning and Building to issue uh requisitions that will be fed into the hardware Asset Management workspace where those agents can then apply the ham workflows for procurement uh for shipping for ordering for receiving for operationalizing and creating the Assets in a in a store room all of those are going to be capable using the hardware Asset Management workflows that are included with TNI uh there's number management capability so the ability out of the box to to manage ranges and assignments of lag numbers VLAN assignments as well as IP address management and telephone number Management in an upcoming release we will be supporting um Power floor space and cooling management so uh environmental kpis will be part of the TNI data model and then everything that we do in TNI leverages the platform construct of change management so uh anything from creating new equipment to um creating new Connections in your network all of those are done leveraging the change management model so we have change flows that we include out of the box that will uh allow you to have workflows to operationalize uh a lot of these motions and then all of it is wrapped up in our Network inventory workspace which is a configurable and customizable user interface uh for the users of network inventory so right now what I'd like to do is spend just a few minutes talking about the cmdb and specifically the classes that support the TNI uh product and then once we uh go through this we'll take a look at a network diagram example and then we'll go into TNI and we'll see how we can compare that Network diagram to the classes that we're looking at uh when we do the demo so when TNI was uh was introduced uh we also introduced several new classes to the cmdb and TNI uses the cmdb TNI is not a separate database from the cmdb instead it does leverage the directly the cmdb and the classes in the cmdb so in this diagram the the classes that are showing in yellow are ones that were added uh when we introduced Network inventory and that concept starts with uh this concept of site so we introduced a class for site in the cmdb and from that we extended this network site and the reason we did that is because there were no classes in the cmdb associated with a network site we do have location that is used but the location belongs to a table that lives outside of the cmdb and the reason we wanted a class for sites in the cmdb is because Network sites have an operational status so when you have a CI that has an operational status so Network sites will have an operational status by virtue of the equipment that's located in those sites so now you've got your network sites your network sites are used to represent all of the different places on your network where you have equipment operating and managed uh those can be Central offices those can be customer sites if if you've got um Services you're providing to your customers you might have their uh locations uh modeled as a network site in your cmdb so the way the hierarchy works is the concept of network site is the foundation once you have your network sites defined now you can start creating the equipment that occupies those sites and to do that we leverage several different classes that we introduced in the cmdb we have this equipment holder class and that is used in in this case to represent the things that hold equipment so things like racks equipment racks um which are extremely common in uh in network operations so you'll have equipment racks you could have cabinets uh that are equipment holders you could have a shelf that's an equipment holder that gets mounted in a rack uh as well as slots and Subs slots so chassis have slots that hold um interface cards and those slots are modeled as equipment holders as well we introduced this class called Tel uh Telco equipment and the Telco equipment class uh has a number of classes that extend from that that are discrete classes associated with very specific equipment types or Technologies I'll show you a slide that gives uh some of those classes so you can get an idea of the granularity that we that we go down to in the cmdb for Network inventory but those uh those devices typically get mounted in in an equipment rack so there is a relationship but contains contained by between Telco equipment or these classes and the equipment holder uh once you've got your equipment related to the rack that it's in now you can create slots on that equipment to represent the slots uh where cards will be installed once those slots are created and represented on that equipment now you can have your interface cards defined that will be related to the slots on those devices um not all devices have slots and cards some uh some are have just ports directly on the equipment so this network interface class which we use to represent um equipment ports can have relationships to uh an interface card where you have a card with ports on it or you could have ports directly on the device itself say if uh if it's a router so these classes are used in conjunction with each other to create any type of equipment for any type of technology in your network and so now that you've got your equipment represented at your network sites now what you want to do is create the relationships between them uh to connect out your network and actually create your network and that's done by a combination of these two classes the physical connection class and The Logical connection class physical connections are used to represent the discret point-to-point connections between two devices so be perhaps a connection between a a switch port and a patch panel uh that would be an example of a physical connection and so you'll have a lot of physical Connections in your network um these are again these discrete point-to-point connections the next class that we have is The Logical connection class and logical connections are used to represent that complete end to end circuit design so so logical connections usually consume physical connections so when you create these physical connections you will then create a logical connection which consists of a series of physical connections logical connections can also consume other logical connections so these can be part of each other so in fact in the in the demo that I'm going to give you I will show you how circuits are created by consuming physical connections and then a high hierarchy of circuits are created on top of that by logical connections being built on top of each other so with that let's take a look at um some of those additional out-of-the-box supported classes that we introduced um that uh descend from the T equipment class so this gives you an idea these are both wire line and wiress related classes we got fiber Broadband uh some of these classes are for Passive devices some of them areer active devices uh so there is a multitude of classes that were introduced to support a multitude of equipment and technology types and then again um the cmdb is is configurable such that if you have equipment that a class doesn't exist for you can create a new class and add that to the model as well so now what I'd like to do is take a look at an a a fairly simple um this is a gigabit Pon Network diagram so this is an example of a gpon network and I'm going to go through this diagram we'll talk about how this relates to the cmdb classes that we just discussed and then I'm going to go into the uh the TNI product and then we'll take a look at how this is represented in the product so if we consider that our inventory model is hierarchical and it starts with the concept of network sites you will see across the bottom here we've got four different different network sites we've got a central office we've got a pfp location where there's a splitter we got a fiber Services terminal location and at the very end here we have a customer site all of these are going to be representations of a network site now in the network site we'll go up to our central office here we can see in this case we've got a number of pieces of equipment that are defined uh as as being occupied at this network site so I've got an ethernet switch I've got an optical line terminal and then I have uh four different fiber distribution panels that are being used to kind of capture these connections from the switch through several different fiber panels to the optical line terminal so if we go into TNI and we take a look at one of these devices we can kind of see the classes that were used to represent it so now I'm in the Telecom Network inventory uh workspace so if we go take a look at our Dallas central office I will pull up this form and I can see that I've got all the information associated with this particular Network site the name the location that it's associated with um the statuses NPA NXX phone numbers all of the different types of information operational notes comment sections um just all the key information that you would have for a network site uh if I had child sites associated with this network site they would be showing up in this tab uh this particular site I do not have any child sites defined um but I do have equipment at this site so if I click on this equipment tab this will give me a list of all of the devices that are currently um located at this Dallas Texas central office so here's my ESS 7450 let's drill into this piece of equipment and see what this is uh all about so here's my overview page I can get a quick look at how this equipment is configured how many slots it has how many cards it has uh and then how many ports are on this device and then it'll give me the availability of these as well uh I can drill into this I can see that this equipment Shelf has two slots this slot appears to have a card in it so this is the card that's occupying that slot and if I drill into that I can see these are the ports that are associated with that card additional detail tab I can pull in here I can see the firmware uh manufacturer model number Etc um this equipment was created uh referencing the product model for the Nokia 7450 I can see that here um I've got serial number axis here as well uh the next thing I want to look at are my physical connections so these are going to be the physical connections that are uh either originating or terminating on this particular piece of equipment so I can see that I've got four physical connections that are um that are attached to this particular ess7 450 so if I go back to my network diagram I will see the 7450 has four different physical connections so each of those physical connections is connecting a port from that 7450 to a position on this fiber distribution panel all right now what I want to take a look at are The Logical connection that are coming in and out of this so I can see that I've got three logical connections I've got two different 10 gbit ethernet paths and then I've got one 20 gig lag path so let's go back to our diagram and take a look at where those come in so as I go up the hierarchy of the network here you can see I've got different layers and so what I want to take a look at here is these two circuits so these are two ether Bearer paths they're 10 gbit paths each of them and the way that they're constructed is they contain connection Elements which consist of physical connections so each of these each of these ethernet Bearer paths has two connection elements the first is a connection from the 7450 to a fiber panel and the second is a connection from the Olt to the fiber panel so each of these gigabit Ethernet Bearer paths contain two uh physical connections to make that circuit up so if we go back into uh we can take a look at one of these gigabit Ethernet paths we'll take a look at uh path 102 I can see that this is um at the same site uh A and Z site are the same so this is a circuit that is uh in the same network site the port assignments for that equipment on there I can see that um more importantly if I go click on my connection elements this connection elements tab essentially is the equivalent of a CLR uh a circuit layout record so it'll give you all of the design components that make up this circuit and then the order in which these components are sequenced so in this case sequence one is a physical connection from the 7450 to a fiber distribution panel and sequence two is a physical connection from a fiber distribution panel to the the optical line terminal if we go back we'll see both of these both of these circuits are designed exactly the same so if I go take a look at path 101 it's going to have two connection elements and those connection elements are going to be the connection elements down here um again from a a port on the 7450 to a fiber panel and then from a fiber panel to the optical line terminal now each of these gigabit Ethernet paths gets consumed by this logical connection path and this is the lag path so this is a link aggregation group and so when we create these logical connection Bearer paths these get consumed into 120 gbit um link aggregation path so if we go back into TNI and take a look at our lag path that's coming out of this es 7450 I can drill into that and I can see that this the connection elements here for this lag path are two logical connections and they are indeed both of the ethernet Bearer paths so that's going to create the top level connection logical Connection in this network design now the to get it out to the customer site there's also going to be a logical connection path between our uh central office and the fiber splitter location and that's going to be a pwn Network path and this is going to be put together pretty much the same way these barrier paths were this Pond network path is going to consist of two connection elements and it's going to be the physical connections that take it out of the Olt as well as the physical connection that con that connects the splitter to the central office so those two physical connections together are what's going to constitute this fiber uh this Pawn network path now there's also going to be a pawn access path that gets created and this is going to um provide the circuit capability from that fiber splitter location all the way to the customer site and this may actually be built as part of the workflow where uh a technician has a task assigned to them where they actually have to go out to this location and physically jumper uh this connection together uh but anyway all of these all of these paths would be would be built and part of the infrastructure that gets that is in place to support a customer service that would get ordered and provisioned over the top of this so if I take a look at the very top here this is an example of an sdwan that a customer has ordered and this service would get provisioned over this gpon network so if I go take a look at this at this circuit you will see that this circuit is going to have connection elements it's going to have the first connection element is going to be uh capacity off of that um logical connection lag path the next is going to be it's going to pull capacity off this logical connection pwn network path so now that's going to get that service from the central office at least out to the splitter location where it can then connect to this Pawn access path that's going to provide it the ability to get to the customer location and then finally the last connection element or the last design component of the service is going to be where the technician is actually going to create a physical connection between the optical Network terminal at the customer location and their router so now if we go into um Network inventory to see what this circuit looks like I have saved that so I can pull that up right away so here's that sdwan service that get provisioned over the top I can go take a look at my connection elements and I can see that I've got network interfaces at the A and the Z side and then to get from the a to the Z side I'm grabbing capacity off that pawn lag path and then the pawn network path and then the pawn access path and then finally that physical connection at the customer site that's connecting that ont to their Gateway I also have the ability to to visualize this as well uh so I can go into my diagram and see here's my logical connection I can drill into this to see what this logical connection is comprised of and I can see indeed that this logical connection has other logical connections that it consumes so going back to the start here I can click on this and see these are my ethernet Bearer paths that get consumed into that one logical lag path I can see my Pon uh network path and if I drill into that I can see what that's consistent of so I can see that that's a physical connection and another physical connection and then the pawn AIS path I can drill into that as well and see how I'm connected from the fiber splitter location uh to the fiber Services terminal and then eventually all the way out to the customer location so that is an overview of the Telecom Network inventory product uh there are other features and functionalities that I will record separate videos on but today I just wanted to give an overview of the the key features and functionality uh for modeling your equipment and your network thank you very much for watching