Overview

General information

The NFM-P allows you to create a customer profile and manage the services the customer subscribes to.

An end user is the recipient of application content that is delivered through a service. The service transports the application content and is owned by a service customer. For example, an end user has high-speed Internet access through a service owned by a service provider who is a customer of the network provider.

On the General tab of a customer properties form, you can configure basic customer information. From the other tabs on the form, you can configure and monitor service objects associated with the customer.

Each customer is associated with an ID that is assigned when the customer account is created. Depending on the NE release, you can also configure a customer name. When configuring a service, you can use the ID or the listed name of the customer to associate a customer with a service.

A customer can own more than one service, but an individual service is owned by only one customer. Two or more services can be joined to form a composite service. The individual services that comprise the composite service can be owned by different customers. Each customer that owns a service in a composite service is associated with the composite service.

Managing the size of a service associated with a customer

A customer service can become very large over time if new sites are continually added. As a result, a service containing thousands of sites or instances may become cumbersome to manage. The NFM-P allows you to easily move sites from one service to another in order to reduce the overall size of a particular service.

Sites can be moved for the following service types supported in NFM-P: VPRN, VPLS, MVPLS, IES, and all VLL types. However, the following restrictions apply:

• You can only move a site between like services, that is, from one VPLS to another VPLS, but not between a VPLS and a VPRN, for instance.

• The services that you are moving sites to and from must have the same Service ID.

• The services that you are moving sites to and from must have the same Customer ID.

If you need to reduce the size of an existing service, you can use another existing service that meets these restrictions. Alternatively, you can create a new service of the same type for this purpose. The service and customer identifiers (name or ID number) of the new service must match those of the existing service.

In addition, if the existing service which you are moving sites from is a member of a composite service, then the newly-created service you are moving the sites to will also belong to the same composite service. This action will only take place after moving the sites that form the composite service connectors. See To move sites from one service to another for more information about how to move sites from one service to another.