NSP uses both NFM-P and MD resync mapping files to populate the NSP operational model with brownfield customer information. These files can be obtained from the artifacts section of the Nokia Support Portal. Once installed, these files will continue to automatically discover new customers that are created using CLI/NFM-P and MD SR OS​. A product artifact for customer life cycle management (create/distribute/audit/align/delete) is interpreted by the NSP as network-created customer instances (CLIs), and will be discovered as such​.

Note: It may take up to 24 hours (default) for customers created using MD CLI to appear​ in the NSP service management views.

If a global NFM-P customer (with no related services) is deleted, the global NSP customer instance will remain. If a new service is created with this customer, the customer instance will be populated back down to the NFM-P. An MD node has no concept of a global customer. During resync, the global NSP customer will be created if it does not already exist.

The NSP customer key is ID. The NFM-P customer key is ID, and the name is set to ID by default. On MD CLI, the key is customer-name, and customer-id is mandatory. This may create a scenario in service management where multiple customers have the same name, but different IDs. Also, attempting to create a customer from one source (NFM-P, for example) that uses the same ID as a previously-discovered customer from another source (MD CLI, for example) will instead add an additional site to the existing customer.

It is also possible that an NE customer site has a different name than the global NSP name.