A national facilities-based Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) operated a nonstop 24x7x365 Network Operations Center (NOC) responsible for monitoring more than 15,000 network devices powering service for over 1 million customers. These devices spanned central offices, fiber hubs, routers, and aggregation switches across metro and regional markets.
Although the CLEC relied on SolarWinds as their Network Management System, the sheer scale and complexity of the environment made outage correlation slow and cumbersome. When alarms flooded in, operators were left with long device lists and raw logs that required manual interpretation to determine whether an outage was isolated to a single central office or symptomatic of a larger regional failure. Each delay directly impacted time-to-resolution (TTR), operational efficiency, and customer experience.
The CLEC needed something beyond tabular dashboards. They required a visual, geographic-first way to instantly correlate outages, identify affected areas, and act decisively, without wasting precious minutes combing through device-by-device status reports.
August 2013
Telecommunications
Operational Excellence
At THIRD SPECTRUM, we believe visibility should be intuitive, not overwhelming. To transform outage management for the CLEC, we set out to build a visualization layer that would translate complex network telemetry into real-time geographic awareness. Our approach focused on bridging SolarWinds data with Google Earth’s visualization capabilities, delivering a dynamic outage map that operators could trust at a glance.
To achieve this, THIRD SPECTRUM engineered a three-layer outage visualization platform tightly integrated with SolarWinds.
We designed an auxiliary Microsoft SQL Server instance to enrich SolarWinds’ data with the attributes necessary for geographical and logical mapping. This database included GPS coordinates for all 15,000+ devices, CLLI codes for central offices, upstream/downstream carrier relationships, and logical hierarchies. By doing so, we transformed raw device lists into structured, map-ready intelligence.
We developed a custom middleware service that continuously queried both SolarWinds and the auxiliary database to produce dynamic KML files. These files included device groupings by CLLI, logical interconnections, and real-time status indicators. Devices and links appeared green when operational (collapsed for readability) and red when failed (expanded for visibility). This ensured operators could instantly differentiate healthy areas from problem zones.
With KML as the backbone, we deployed a live dashboard powered by Google Earth in the NOC. The interface automatically zoomed into affected regions during outages, highlighting downed devices and links while exposing critical metadata like CLLI, carrier information, and upstream relationships. Instead of parsing endless logs, operators now had a real-time, geographical view of the problem.
The result was a map-centric, intuitive outage visualization system where the network told its own story, reducing the cognitive overhead of manual interpretation and enabling operators to focus on remediation.
The impact was immediate and transformative. When outages occurred, the NOC could now see precisely where and how the network was failing, whether confined to a single central office or spread across an entire region. Instead of manually correlating logs, operators relied on live, visual intelligence to shorten TTR dramatically.
Customer experience improved because outages were triaged faster, service-restoration efforts began sooner, and communication to stakeholders was more accurate. Operationally, the NOC saw reduced workload and greater situational awareness, while leadership gained confidence that their infrastructure could scale without drowning in data noise.
By merging SolarWinds monitoring with Google Earth visualization, THIRD SPECTRUM delivered more than just an outage dashboard, we gave the CLEC a geographic command center, empowering them to keep one million customers connected with confidence.
Complex
dotnet, Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft SQL, Solarwinds Orion
