The growing myriad of communications devices, the rising demand for anytime-anywhere connectivity and the increasing need for convergence have created new challenges to network operations - including how to manage the whole system from end to end.

Avaya understands network management and recognizes that offering you the right networking tools can lead to positive and significant benefits for your business. For example, network applications that automate tasks and reporting can improve efficiency. Having management tools within a common framework can reduce deployment & training requirements, help improve workflow and decrease the complexity of managing a network, while providing a smooth path to unified communications.
To address the challenges of managing today’s converged networks, Avaya offers the Visualization Performance and Fault Manager Plus (VPFM Plus) - a powerful Avaya application that provides advanced network discovery, topology visualization, fault and performance management.
End-to-end visibility in a multi-vendor environment
The VPFM Plus can discover every device on your network, even from non- Avaya vendors. The application transforms complex network topology into simple-to-use, hierarchy- based maps, giving you clear, end-to-end views that help you quickly determine if network issues are physical or logical in nature.
With insight into how devices are connected and performing, you can zero in on aspects of the network and reduce your meantime to repair. Personnel can be dispatched quickly, which can result in less downtime, greater productivity, higher user satisfaction and a proactive rather than reactive network management environment.

Network discovery
The VPFM Plus offers heterogeneous rather than domain-based network
discovery with support for standards-, proprietary-, application- and OS-based
discovery. Therefore, if a device is IP or SNMP-based, the VPFM Plus can
discover it. Discovery applies to servers, end nodes and operating systems.
The application discovers all IP devices and nodes attached to the network,
including servers, storage servers, printer servers, switches, routers, user end
nodes (e.g., PCs and laptops), IP phones, Avaya Aura® applications, VM hosts,
and more. In addition, the VPFM Plus identifies the relationships that exist
among devices in the network, including topology and links. Operating systems
and applications on servers can also be part of the discovery process if
operating system security settings allow.

Fault management
Once the issue(s) have been identified through network visualization, you can use the VPFM Plus to monitor the network for faults. Using information collected from the network and the devices themselves, the VPFM Plus performs status monitoring and sends the information that you need to do event correlation and route-cause analysis (RCA). The VPFM Plus determines what is the most likely cause of the network outage by correlating all network events and determining the primary and secondary devices affected.

Performance management
Through the VPFM Plus, you can use performance management for two key activities: capacity planning and change monitoring within the network. In the latter case, the VPFM Plus enables you to monitor modifications to the network - such as the addition of a new switch - and observe how the device performs in the short term.