This paper presents an integrated simulation environment which has two purposes: to help dimensioning distributed systems in the field of telecommunication network management, and to be a guideline for software design of such systems. Dimensioning concerns salespersons, who have to quickly optimise configurations in terms of cost and efficiency in order to meet customer requirements. Software designers can use this tool to make and validate architectural choices, as well as to exhaustively test the performance and limits of the system. The proposed tool focuses on management traffic (rather than data traffic). With network supervision becoming more and more critical and intensive, simulation proves to be more appropriate than usual theoretical methods. However, to improve the assessment efficiency, simulation studies should be performed by the same teams who design or market the products. Unfortunately,, available simulation tools require specific skills. As a consequence, we developed a tool which provides an intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface, and gives easy access to the underlying models of the objects composing the network.
