Alternate Names and Linking Keys

Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It’s a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.”
Joan Aiken
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By their very nature, OSS also live in the alternate worlds of NMS.

It is the responsibility of your OSS to take feeds from diverse data sets, from devices of a multitude of vendors, across a range of different technologies / topologies, to deliver any number of services via customised processes.

Each one of those feeds have their own existence and are usually created with scant regard for anyone else’s data feed.

Therefore, the onus is on the OSS to provide the link between the diverse feeds.

This is where Alternate Names and Linking Keys become fundamental to the OSS making valuable connections.

For example, vendor A and vendor B both build their SDH equipment to the same specification so that they can interconnect. But they don’t give a thought about the naming conventions used and each is built with local uniqueness rather than global uniqueness. This is where the OSS must have the provision for recording alternate names (one with a globally unique naming convention and the other with each vendor’s locally unique [ie NMS] convention).

Using the same example, the only way to trace a single SDH circuit through separate data sets with different naming conventions is to store a linking key across the different data sets so that they can be easily merged.

Without this pre-planning, you’re going to have problems with data integrity in your OSS.

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