EXFO Xtract is a “comprehensive monitoring platform using a combination of patented software engines to collect, analyze, correlate and report on real-time, historical, and predicted events in the network,” EXFO said when announcing the solution. The company added that the system “offers complete visibility of network infrastructure performance through a distributed polling system with the ability to monitor millions of elements in real time.”
Legacy monitoring solutions realistically cannot cope, economically, with the new infrastructure scale and complexity that comes with the marked rise in virtualization and cloud-based service offerings, EXFO further explained. In the midst of this new reality, “EXFO Xtract was developed to give network operators an in-depth view of their infrastructure, as well as the level of information required to improve the overall control and performance of their network,” the company said. “This is accomplished through proactive monitoring and management of their assets, regardless of infrastructure size, geographical deployment distribution, or network topology architecture.”
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The solution is designed to run on, and take advantage of, commodity hardware by allowing it to be deployed in a traditional or virtualized environment. EXFO says the Xtract system has the industry’s smallest hardware footprint and, compared to competitive systems, achieves hardware-capex savings of 60 percent or more.
“Many service providers are overwhelmed by the number of events and alarms that their network operation centers receive on a daily basis,” the company continued. “In many cases, critical events go unnoticed. EXFO Xtract has an integrated fault solution to help organizations gain operational efficiency through its out-of-the-box, known network events and their corresponding sets of intelligent rules for alarm filtering, deduplication and reduction. In addition to the existing rules, EXFO Xtract provides a simple mechanism capable of enriching its knowledge ruels based on the operator’s current or ongoing experiences.”
The solution is equipped with a large number of preloaded management information bases that contain key performance indicators, EXFO explained, thereby providing rapid time-to-value by bypassing installation and configuration processes. “In many cases, the solution can be deployed and operational within a single day for immediate value to operators,” the company said.
The vice president of EXFO’s transport and service assurance division, Claudio Mazzuca, commented, “EXFO Xtract is leveraged in proactive scenarios to identify trends and impending problems related to the service infrastructure, thus enabling operators to take action before service outages occur for better operational efficiency. EXFO’s carrier-grade solution uses the combination of its patented adaptive polling and scalable-down-to-a-second data extraction to pinpoint network problems in real time.”