Frequently Asked Questions

No, the ecosystem is completely self-service. You can create an account directly through the web app, the mobile app or FastReporter.

For more details, please refer to the Getting Started section.

EXFO Exchange currently supports English only.

Currently EXFO Exchange is not supported in China. It would require deployment of a local server in China which is not feasible at the moment.

For FastReporter, users in China can either use the free version of FastReporter or purchase the USB dongle that will unlock the capabilities of the full version. See FastReporter comparison chart.

Yes, EXFO Exchange offers unlimited storage for test data with browsing and drill-down capabilities that are normally not offered or possible with generic cloud storage, such as Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox.

Currently there is no limit. This is part of our Freemium offering, but EXFO does reserve the right to modify this at any later date.

Note: EXFO will keep your test data for a minimum of 5 years.

Within the scope of the Freemium plan, there is no limitation.

Furthermore, additional paid features on a per-unit basis (e.g., anti-theft) will become available in the future.

You can access your data from our web application, available at https://exfoexchange.com.

You can also access it via APIs or a datamart at additional costs.

No, not at this time. Exchange is a SaaS hosted in the “public cloud” and our hosting partner is AWS.

In fact, this represents substantial cost savings for you since you will not have to manage server infrastructure on your own and you can get started in minutes instead of weeks.

EXFO Exchange currently supports the following handheld devices:

FIP-435B, FIP-500, OX1, PPM1, PPM350D, EX1/EX10

The following OTDRs and platforms are also supported:

MAX-700B, MAX-700C, MAX-700D, MAX-900, FTB-1v2, FTB-2 Pro and FTB-4 Pro.

The complete list of test units supported is documented in the Compatible products section.

EXFO Exchange supports most optical tests (fiber inspection, OTDR, OPM, OLTS) as well as some T&D (CPRI/eCPRI, iOptics, EtherBERT)

The complete list of supported test types is available in the Compatible products section.

The Exchange app is available on all FTB platforms, and you can download it automatically on you unit via EXFO Software Update (ESU). You can also download it manually from the FTB series section of the EXFO Software download site.

The Exchange app is also available on MaxTester 700 and 900 series. You can download the latest System Image from Handheld units section of the EXFO Software download site.

SOR files can be imported into Exchange via FastReporter and will be treated as OTDR results once imported.

In fact, you can attach any kind of files to a job or result via the web app or mobile app, including third party result files.

IMPORTANT: When attaching an SOR to an existing result, it will be treated as generic file.

EXFO Exchange is officially available on the MAX-700 with System Image 3.1 and above.

If you want to use Exchange with an older System Image (e.g. SI 2.38 with iOLM 8.34), please contact your account representative.

The job management feature is already available to all customers and will be further improved in the coming months.

By default, the web app allows to create jobs that are single-measurement based. However, our “job template” mechanism can support several combinations that can be tailored to your needs. Once custom templates are defined (based on the customer MOP) and imported into Exchange, they become available to all users collaborating within the organization and can be used to create jobs in a specific format.

As an alternative, you can also create jobs via a CSV file, which offers additional flexibility currently not offered via the templates. Please refer to the following section for more help Importing jobs.

This issue can happen in the EXFO Exchange application, which is available on both iOS and Android, as well as FTB and MaxTester test units. There are three possible causes you don’t see your jobs in the EXFO Exchange application.

One key advantage of EXFO Exchange is enabling you to easily collaborate with your customers within the ecosystem. When you are invited to another account, the account’s owner will see all the measurements being uploaded “live”. However, you can easily identify results to be reviewed by using job statuses (e.g., “in progress” and “completed”) or move jobs to a specific sub-workspace (e.g., named “in review”).

YES. You can integrate EXFO Exchange with your own system in many ways, using both APIs and/or datamart.

IMPORTANT: Access to both APIs and datamart is a paid feature.

You can use the Exchange datamart to collect test results data from Exchange and consolidate this data with your own data sets / databases.

Furthermore, you can also use our APIs or the web application to extract test result data in both JSON and binary format (such as SORs) and import them to your system or database.

Our datamart is not meant to include external data sources.

However, you can integrate multiple sources (including Exchange datamart) in most BI tools, such as Power BI or Tableau.

EXFO Exchange does not provide dashboarding capabilities for the moment.

The software platform focuses on providing simple ways to integrate with the most commonly used Analytics solutions without the need for a software development team. We believe this approach creates a better work environment.

A datamart can be considered as an interface to your data. It is built with the intent to be understood by data analysts. This enables codeless integration between our solutions and your data ecosystem.

We currently provide two interfaces to access the datamart: MySQL database or CSV files hosted on a SFTP server.

A datamart can also be easily integrated with any commercial BI tool, such as Microsoft Power BI or Tableau.

For more information on data access, please refer to the Access points section of our developer’s documentation.

Our datamarts centralizes all data from the EXFO ecosystem (EXFO Exchange, TestFlow and EXFO Connect).

They provide data and metrics in different areas such as: work progress, technician’s efficiency, test result details, network quality and test device usage.

For more information on datamart capabilities, please refer to the Key concepts and Use cases section of our developer’s documentation.

A sample Power BI template can be found in the developer’s documentation.

We guarantee that your data will be updated once every 24 hours, before 5 A.M. GMT.

Each datamart is hosted in a single tenant MySQL database instance, which means your data is “independent” and accessible only by you.

Your data privacy is protected as per the GDPR guidelines.