The OSS Matrix – the blue or the red pill?

OSS Matrix
OSS tend to be very good at presenting a current moment in time – the current configuration of the network, the health of the network, the activities underway.

Some (but not all) tend to struggle to cope with other moments in time – past and future.

Most have tools that project into the future for the purpose of capacity planning, such as link saturation estimation (based on projecting forward from historical trend-lines). Predictive analytics is a current buzz-word as research attempts to predict future events and mitigate for them now.

Most also have the ability to look into the past – to look at historical logs to give an indication of what happened previously. However, historical logs can be painful and tend towards forensic analysis. We can generally see who (or what) performed an action at a precise timestamp, but it’s not so easy to correlate the surrounding context in which that action occurred. They rarely present a fully-stitched view in the OSS GUI that shows the state of everything else around it at that snapshot in time past. At least, not to the same extent that the OSS GUI can stitch and present current state together.

But the scenario that I find most interesting is for the purpose of network build / maintenance planning. Sometimes these changes occur as isolated events, but are more commonly run as projects, often with phases or milestone states. For network designers, it’s important to differentiate between assets (eg cables, trenches, joints, equipment, ports, etc) that are already in production versus assets that are proposed for installation in the future.

And naturally those states cross over at cut-in points. The proposed new branch of the network needs to connect to the existing network at some time in the future. Designers need to see available capacity now (eg spare ports), but be able to predict with confidence that capacity will still be available for them in the future. That’s where the “reserved” status comes into play, which tends to work for physical assets (eg physical ports) but can be more challenging for logical concepts like link utilisation.

In large organisations, it can be even more challenging because there’s not just one augmentation project underway, but many. In some cases, there can be dependencies where one project relies on capacity that is being stood up by other future projects.

Not all of these projects / plans will make it into production (eg funding is cut or a more optimal design option is chosen), so there is also the challenge of deprecating planned projects. Capability is required to find whether any other future projects are dependent on this deprecated future project.

It can get incredibly challenging to develop this time/space matrix in OSS. If you’re a developer of OSS, the question becomes whether you want to take the blue or red pill.

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