Ciena Site Manager — per-NE workflow

Site Manager is the Windows desktop application Ciena ships for managing a single 6500 (or other Ciena NE) at a time. Think of it as the chassis's own front panel, brought to your laptop. It speaks directly to the Shelf Processor via management network and gives you complete control over one shelf: inventory, port commissioning, alarms, performance monitoring, software upgrades.

For network-level workflows that span many NEs, you use NCS (next lesson). For "log in and fix this one thing on this one shelf," Site Manager is the tool.

What you typically do with Site Manager

| Workflow | What it looks like | |---|---| | Connect to an NE | File → New → Network Element. Enter the SP's management IP, credentials, click connect. The shelf graphic appears on screen. | | Inventory | The shelf view shows every slot, populated cards, types, software versions, and module-level FRU info. Right-click a card → Properties for full datasheet view. | | Commission a port | Equipment / Facilities → select the port (e.g. an OTU4 on slot 11) → enable, set rate, set wavelength (for line side), set TTI, save. | | Provision a cross-connect (OCh / ODU) | Cross Connects → New → pick source (a client port) → pick destination (a line port at a given wavelength) → choose direction (uni / bi) → submit. | | View alarms | Fault → Active Alarms. Severity (CR/MJ/MN/WG), entity, raised time, probable cause. Right-click → Acknowledge / clear / view details. | | PMs (performance monitoring) | PM → Current 15-minute / 24-hour bins for any facility. Optical PMs (Rx power, OSNR, pre-FEC BER), Ethernet PMs (frames, errors, drops). | | Software upgrade | Equipment → SW Upgrade → push the image to the SP active flash, validate, schedule the activation. The SP coordinates a controlled card-by-card upgrade. |

The Site Manager visual grammar

Once you've used it for a week, the colours and shapes are intuitive:

• Green — facility in service, no faults.
• Red — critical or major alarm.
• Yellow — minor / warning.
• Grey — administratively disabled or unequipped.
• Striped — alarm suppressed by an upstream condition.
• Lock icon — administrative lock (a service is provisioned, you can't yank the cable without confirming).

A shelf with everything green and a row of properly-coloured wavelengths in the WSS lane is a happy shelf. A shelf full of orange means somebody is having a bad day.

Provisioning a basic 100G OTU4 wavelength (worked example)

You want to bring up a new 100 GbE-over-OTU4 service between Node A and Node B. On Site Manager pointing at Node A:

1. Slot 11 is a coherent transponder card with a 100G client port and a coherent line port.
2. Equipment → slot 11 → enable if it's not already in service.
3. Facilities → 11-CLIENT-1 → set type 100GbE, admin state unlocked. Connect the client fiber (LC duplex).
4. Facilities → 11-LINE-1 → set type OTU4, set frequency (eg 192.95 THz, choose a channel coordinated with the rest of the network plan), set TTI strings (helps trail trace identification), admin state unlocked. Connect the line fiber to the local CCMD/WSS port that maps to that wavelength.
5. Cross Connects → New → bidirectional → source 11-CLIENT-1 → dest 11-LINE-1.
6. Repeat at Node B with the same frequency and matching TTI.
7. Watch alarms clear. PMs should show non-zero Rx power within seconds. Pre-FEC BER should be very low (better than 1E-4 for a healthy WaveLogic 5 link).

The actual underlying messages between Site Manager and the SP are TL1 commands, but you almost never type them — the GUI does the translation.

What to remember

• Site Manager = one NE at a time, GUI client to the Shelf Processor.
• Inventory, commissioning, alarms, PMs, software — everything is in the same shelf-graphic view.
• Cross-connects are the data-plane provisioning: client port ↔ line port at a chosen frequency.
• Site Manager talks TL1 under the hood, but you stay in the GUI 99% of the time.
• For end-to-end (multi-NE) service creation, escalate to NCS (next lesson).