Assuring High Quality of Experience!

Passive network signaling monitoring solutions perform end-to-end network and service analysis, across multiple transport technologies, and are effective in assuring network availability and service quality.

Irrespectively of whether carriers operate traditional PSTN / GSM networks or run VoIP / IMS services, a monitoring solution is needed to assure the quality of delivered services that make the difference in today's competitive market.

The monitoring (probe) systems extract all signaling and user data directly from the signaling links, using non-intrusive and failsafe technology, and ensure highly-reliable network connectivity. Using information obtained from signaling and user data, rather than individual network elements, provides a unified and independent analysis of network or service performance. Signaling constitutes an ideal source of relevant data, regardless of the network element type or vendor.

Monitoring applications extract, compress, filter, decode, distribute data and provide usable measurements for quick real-time detection, analysis and reporting, or collect data overtime to provide offline analysis of historical information.

Highly-reliable monitoring solutions enable operators to cost-effectively migrate their legacy networks to the Next Generation world, while providing the capability to monitor anything: from high-level application and conversation flow information, all the way down to the transferred packets, and from legacy-standard networks to triple- / quad-play IP configurations.

INTRACOM TELECOM has great expertise in the specific OSS area, with highly- experienced stuff for professional services and a vast record of successful reference cases.

Since 1998, the company has formed strategic partnerships with best-of-breed market vendors for the supply, implementation and integration, as well as after-sale support of signaling monitoring and troubleshooting solutions. As a system Integrator and a system developer, INTRACOM TELECOM has created a very flexible and dynamic team of professionals dedicated to the design and implementation of customer-specific projects.

The offered Network Signaling Monitoring solution simplifies, accelerates and enhances all business processes, from operations to marketing, offering a series of significant benefits to operators:

• Powerful integrated analysis capabilities for monitoring and managing all carrier network types (PSTN, GSM, GPRS, 3G, VoIP, triple-play and IMS) and supporting all network architectures.
• All signaling and user-related data is directly extracted from the signaling links, using non-intrusive and failsafe technology (passive probes), while ensuring highly reliable network connectivity.
• Modular design for unique scaling possibilities.
• State-of-the-art hardware, high-performance software and standardized interfaces for integration with other platforms (e.g. fault management).
• Violation detection mechanisms enable carriers to spot problems and proactively maintain service levels before customer experience degrades.
• Troubleshooting tools, taking effect at session and protocol level, help identifying root causes – quick and easy diagnosis for less reliance on high-paid engineers, and for saving critical time while keeping customers satisfied.
• Integrated tools provide enterprise-wide insight across customers, services and networks – business support system data is combined with customer experience records to analyze SLA compliance, roaming patterns and popularity of third-party content.
• Collected OSS data is combined with BSS information, residing on an enterprise data warehouse, to provide enhanced intelligence for getting a single view of the business, from the network edge down to customer care and finance.

Typical applications, which are made available through the Network Signaling Monitoring solution from INTRACOM TELECOM, include:

Call / Session Trace

Basic application for monitoring calls / transactions, either in real time or historically. A troubleshooting tool provides network-wide visibility of the key signaling interfaces in order to pinpoint service-affecting issues and understand the root cause.

Protocol Analyzer

Basic application for monitoring protocol messages in real time or historically. Through this application, the network engineer can have access to every bit and byte in the calling processes and protocol messages.

Quality of Service (Performance) Analyzer

Application for monitoring different KPIs, in near real time and for different calling / transaction groups, and for generating alarms at certain thresholds pre-defined by the end-user. This application can automatically generate customized reports at configurable time periods.

Alarms

Application enabling the generation of alarms when certain filter criteria for protocol messages, calls / transactions or KPIs are met. Filter criteria are user configurable.

Network / Link Status

Application for monitoring alarms on MTP1, MTP2 MTP3 level, and generating alarms on high link load, low performance, and large amounts of call attempts.

Network Real-Time Statistics

Application for setting up and viewing diagrams / statistical information in real time, over certain types of network messages and/or transactions.

OSS Business Intelligence Reporting Tools

OSS reporting suite consisting of a number of high-level applications, which provide network operators with information on the status of their offered services, network performance, and customer behavior.
This suite also incorporates active applications embedding intelligent tools for the development of new and improved subscriber services, for simultaneous cost reduction and increased revenue.

A Network Signaling Monitoring solution extracts signaling information to allow the monitoring, troubleshooting and generation of xDR / SNMP traps for all kinds of networks and applications. Signaling traffic is captured in true real time, independently of the number and type of switches and network size.

The solution can proactively manage the network by constantly monitoring end-to-end KPIs and KQIs, and immediately highlighting any degrading trends. For instance, should parts of the network reach their capacity limits, this would normally affect the dropped-call ratio and set-up times. Through monitoring and early-warning alarms on these KPIs, the operator has ample time to add network capacity before performance limitations lead to severely-degraded quality and subsequent customer complaints.

In addition to assuring a high level of customer satisfaction, a proactive approach can yield OpEx savings by minimizing the number of trouble-tickets. Pre-defined reports visualize service quality, facilitating trend-and root-cause analysis across all network layers.

By monitoring the various protocols and by providing quality metrics, either on the network or on the actual service, the solution assures end-to-end view of the service quality all the way, from the user terminal to the core network. The correlation and traces between interconnected NGN and legacy networks is also facilitated.

Information is collected in real time from probes (i.e. monitoring hardware), creating both transaction-based call-flow information, as well as xDRs. The most efficient way to collect this information is by installing the probes at those nodes with the highest concentration of signaling links. Probes are LAN / WAN interconnected to allow correlation of messages and events among the various monitoring points. This feature ensures both scalability and CapEx savings, and allows operators to expand their systems, as prescribed by their network expansion needs, by simply adding more probes at the remote sites.

The captured information (xDRs) is used for generating user-specific and predefined KPIs / KQIs at the centrally-located application servers. The generated KPIs / KQIs are all visualized in an intuitive web browser-based interface. KPIs can be created from different perspectives in the network, providing an omni-directional (360°) view from customer, network, service or terminal perspective.