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MONITORINGANDSERVICEASSURANCE

Protocol Analysis

Integrated Service Quality and PerformanceMonitoring

The MasterClaw Protocol Analysis application is a multi-user and multi- protocol systems tool used for seamless protocol decoding of historical and real-time PDUs. When performing protocol analysis, the user simply selects the links on which the application shall be applied and the system starts displaying the messages for those links. The different protocol lay- ersare presented according to the ISO/OSI model and messages from different links or different protocol layers can be displayed with different colors in the monitor window with color schemes being user configurable. Are the network resources used properly? How are my services per-forming? How do my customers perceive the service quality? Are the customers getting the agreed service? Are my interconnect partners delivering the agreed service? These are just a few examples of questions that a network operator or service provider needs to an- swer in order to maintain the customer satisfaction, minimize the op- erational costs and hence secure the revenue. MasterClaw’s integrated service assurance solution provides an in- tegrated monitoring universe, feeding a wide range of different user categories, including operational network personnel, network plan- ners, product managers, account managers, partner managers, with vital operational and business information. Building on the same con- verged data acquired from the network, MasterClaw offers powerful reporting capabilities across Network, Service, Customer and Partner domains in both real-time and via KPI- and KQI reports. In addition to this MasterClaw allows for definition of service level tar- gets enabling both internal- and external SLAs. Understanding Quality of Service Metrics Although voice is a legacy service that is the very foundation for most operators’ business, the voice service can serve as a good example of how technology convergence, and new access technologies dra- matically increase the complexity of the underlying value chain and hence the overall complexity of the service. Basic network oriented KPIs, such as Connection Success Rate, is excellent to monitor in- dividual network segment’s performance, but a single KPI only pro- vides a limited picture of the overall service experience, as perceived by the end-user. Only by aggregating data from several sources and correlating quality of service metrics from different domains can the overall end-to-end quality of service be determined. Alarm Manager As a part of the core application set MasterClaw also includes an Alarm Manager. The Alarm Manager receives alarms from multiple sources in the system: probe generated alarms or performance and QoS related alarms generated by the Traffic Observer or any of the KPIs/KQIs han- dledby the DWH. Alarms may be configured in different ways (severity,coloring, etc.) and thresholds may be configured according to the type of day (week-day, weekend-day, holiday) and the time of that day. When an alarm occurs it is possible to drill down into the alarm, thereby automatically launching e.g. reports with pre-selected parameters. Any internal MasterClaw alarm can be propagated to external faultmanagement systems via for example SNMP. Figure 8. Protocol Analysis result Link and Message KPI To further ease the problem analysis and root-cause analysis, MasterClaw provides an advanced Link and Message based DWH solution offering reports based on link counters, message counters and link load counters. The Link and Message solution is a versatile data ware-house application that can be applied to any protocol or network technology giving access to thousands of user-defined counters from different protocol layers. Thanks to the locally stored signaling data in the probes, trou-bleshooting can not only be made in real-time but also made on al- ready captured historical data. This is of course a tremendous ad- vantage during fault location and route-cause analysis. Features, such as advanced filter functions, alternative display formats, condi- tioned color coding, online protocol references, etc. makes the trou- bleshooting applications extremely user friendly and efficient to use. Figure 10. MasterClaw’s Integrated Service Quality and Performance Monitoring Framework Figure 9. MasterClaw Alarm Manager Figure 11. Service Quality Components in a traditional Voice Service http://www.nettest.com ? http://www.anritsu.com 648