Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.1 Unit 4 Inventory Management Process OSS Essentials by Kornel Terplan

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.2 The inventory management process This process encompasses physical installation of the equipment and it’s administration – installation and acceptance of equipment, with the physical configuration of the network, and handling of spare parts and the repair process – Software upgrades, implementing IP-based services, the number of managed objects is going to grow and so is the inventory – Physical assets also include servers, access servers, gateways, routers, and new connections

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.3 The inventory management process Principal tasks of this process are  Installation and administration of the physical network  Performing work in the network  Managing the repair activities  Aligning inventory with network  Managing spare parts  Managing fault parts

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.4 The service creation, planning and development process This process encompasses the following functional areas – Designing technical capability to meet specified market need at desired cost – Ensuring that the service (product) can be properly installed, monitored, controlled, and billed – Initiating appropriate processes and methods, modifications, as well as initiating required training to the appropriate personnel contd..

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.5 The service creation, planning and development process – Initiating any modifications to the underlying network or information systems to support the requirements – Performing pre-service testing to confirm that the technical capability works & the system functions properly – Ensuring that sufficient capacity is available to meet forecasted sales

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.6 The service creation, planning and development process Total trend is towards the complete software based solutions of the services and support activities for ever changing network infrastructure needs, following are the principal functions Develop & implement technical solutions Develop & implement procedures Define & implement system changes ( VPN, CNM etc..) Develop & implement training Develop customer documentation (plan, test, start-service etc..) Set product/service pricing

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.7 The network planning and development process This process encompasses development and acceptance of strategy, description of standard network configurations for operational use, and definition of rules for network planning, installation, and maintenance. It is about the planning of boundary nodes, routes, and capacity. Many IP-based services & their multiple alternatives are available. Popular solutions are - IP over ATM or IP over SONET/SDH After topology is finalised, logical connections are expected to be provisioned along with backup / reserve capacity provisioning

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.8 The network planning and development process Special modelling tools are very useful to predict future performance under various load conditions. These tools utilize what-if scenarios to emulate performance under various load conditions. These tools depend on the protocols used. Many providers work with multiple tools. There are practically different tools for each service. Using these tools a proper design of the logical network configuration is provided to the network provisioning process

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.9 The network planning and development process This process also deals with designing the network capability to meet a specified service need at the desired cost and for ensuring that the network can be properly installed, monitored, controlled, and billed. The process is also responsible for ensuring that enough network capacity will be available to meet the forecasted demand.

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.10 The network planning and development process Principal functions are as follows :  Develop & implement procedures  Setup framework agreements  Develop new methods & architectures  Plan required network capacity  Issue orders to suppliers & other network operators  Plan the logical network configuration  Evaluate service metrics

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.11 The service configuration process This process encompasses the installation and/or configuration of services for specific customers, including the installation/ configuration of customer premises equipment. Offering IP-based services, additional functions must be considered. In particular, firewalls, application services such as , Web hosting, and their configurations are important.

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.12 The network planning and development process Considering IP-based services, multiple alternatives for the implementation are available. Popular solutions are – IP over ATM – IP over frame relay – IP over SONET/SDH

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.13 The service configuration Also the setting of parameters to support QoS and SLA requirements is important. The more that can be automated, the better service providers do in the competitive market.

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.14 The security management Due to factors such as opening networks, connecting partners, and using a public domain such as the Internet security risks increase considerably. Virtual private networks (VPNs) are one of the possible answers to combining existing infrastructure with acceptable protection. Security management procedures are identical or at least very similar.

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.15 The security management Security management is in charge of protecting all systems solutions. Process includes a planning and controlling function - In particular, three basic threats are considered: loss of availability of services, loss of integrity, and loss of privacy.

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.16 The service problem resolution process Process encompasses isolating the root cause of service- affecting and non-service-affecting failures and acting to resolve them. Typically, failures affect multiple customers. Actions may include immediate reconfiguration or other corrective actions. Aim is to understand the causes impacting service performance and to implement immediate fixes or initiate quality improvement efforts.

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.17 The service quality management process This process supports monitoring service or product quality on a service class basis in order to determine whether Service levels are being met consistently There are any general problems with the service or product The sale and use of the service is tracking to forecasts

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.18 The service quality management process This process also encompasses taking appropriate action to keep service levels within agreed targets for each service class and to either keep ahead of demand or alert the sales process to slow sales. The aim is effective service-specific monitoring and to manage service levels to meet SLA commitments and standard commitments for the specific service.

05/10/2015Prof. N. P. Pathak - Dept. of I.T.19 The network maintenance and restoration process This process encompasses maintaining the operational quality of the network in accordance with required network performance goals. Network maintenance activities can be – preventative-such as scheduled routine maintenance or – or corrective. Corrective maintenance can be in response to faults or to indications that problems may be developing (proactive).

Network Operational Management Chapters

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements Surveys clearly show that the priority sequence of customer interest is as follows:  Availability of: 1) all components 2) application on the network 3) Availability of servers  Network RTT or delay  Application response time during peak periods  Availability of clients  Server delay  Mean application response time  Client delay  Median application response time  Percentage of transactions completed within defined performance levels

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements: Availability Availability percentage SA% is to indicate the time during which the contracted service at the respective access point (SAP) is operational Other sources say: The outage length distribution is in special interest: specifically the question ”How long can a single outage be before it affects the customers’ operational ability and how often will outages this long or longer occur?” Service availability always has three dimensions:

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements: Time dimension

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements: Site dimension

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements: Functional dimension

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements: All three in same picture

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements Usually SLA:s concentrate on time dimension only, locations are mentioned but only to define network boundaries The functional dimension brings in the application layer, most important for customer Before service providers were not forced to sign complex SLA’s. Due to liberalization, this is changing dramatically

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements Response time is the key metrics, although the definition varies Usually the duration between sending the inquiry and receiving the full answer is considered as response time This definition is better-suited definition for the working cycle of users

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements One of the big obstacles in implementing SLAs is the inability to create a solid baseline of data to quantify the historical performance of the service provider with various customers This leads to difficulties in creating realistic and meaningful SLAs, expectations may be set unrealistcally high SLAs of the past have failed due to their lack of accurate measurement data. It has been recorded manually an has often been unreliable New monitoring tools have increased the quality and quantity of data available for SLA evaluation

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements Present measurement technology offers following alternatives:  Monitors and packet analyzers  Synthetic workload tools  Application agents  User of ARM MIBs

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements When evaluating products, many components must be factored in:  Customization needs  Maintenance requirements  Deployment of code  Overhead of transmitting measurement data  Load increase due to synthetic workload  Reporting capabilities  Capabilities to solve complex performance problems  Capabilities to conduct root-cause analysis  Combination with modeling tools  Price of the tools

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements SLM Requires that multiple metrics are continuously supervised and measured. Depending on the contract, several reports are generated and distributed. Data sources include:  Trouble tickets  Alarm and security logs  Performance metrics that have been measured by various tools, described above

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements

05/10/ Maintain Service Level Agreements

05/10/2015 Chapters Monitor Available Capacity / Usage against Forecasted Sales Initiate Service Improvements Inform Sales on Constraints

05/10/ The Network Maintenance and Restoration Process

05/10/ Initiate Service Improvements

05/10/ The Network Maintenance and Restoration Process This process encompasses maintaining the operational quality of the network in accordance with required network performance goals Network maintenance activities can be preventative or corrective Supervisory should be extended for IP- based services

05/10/ The Network Maintenance and Restoration Process The principal tasks include  Problem analysis, including testing, fig 6.20  Proactive recognition of problem trends  Network quality maintenance and restoration  Maintenance of historic data of network problems and performance

05/10/ Problem Analysis, Including Testing

05/10/ The Data Collection and Data Management Process Principal tasks include  Collection od usage data via call detail records (CDRs) and IP detail records (IPDRs)‏  Mediation on collected data  Use of SS7 in collecting data  Data warehousing for maintaining data  Baselining and generating performance metrics for reporting  Maintaining trouble tickets in a database  Providing notification on performance  Initiating traffic metrics collection

05/10/ Collection of Usage Data via CDRs and IPDRs