The
following case study was taken from a client in the
Telecommunications vertical market with an organization that supplied
back-haul network and last mile network connectivity to other
businesses. The challenge facing the business was other companies and
competitors turning up unlicensed microwave radio equipment that
interfered with their licensed microwave radio equipment operating on
specific frequencies and geographical zones, that served their client
base. When undetected these disturbances cause quality of service
issues (QoS) of unknown origin's that (negatively) affect the end
customer perception of the service they are receiving (paying for).
This perception can lead to loss of revenue (through client loss) and
was imperative to increase visibility into the occurrences.
The
challenge was to come up with a predictive monitoring solution that
could detect when any type of interference, sustained or
intermittent, would occur and not only notify Support, via alarms,
but also to provide historical analytics data to track such
occurrences for event begin, thresholding, duration and event end.
A
discovery and gap analysis was done with the Owner and CTO of the
organization to determine the issue/affect, business case,
architectural layout of the network and prospective goals. The
analysis also drilled into each equipment manufacturer to make
determinations on the capabilities of each model of equipment
involved. Finally a project plan was designed and agreed upon with a
course of action (milestones) to achieve the project goals.
The
case example, taken from the solution provided at project conclusion,
below depict a Voice (VoIP) customer that was affected by a
competitor bringing up an unlicensed radio device within the same
frequency range and geographical zone as the customers installed
licensed equipment. The predictive monitoring was able to detect
voice quality degradation at the instant the competitor brought the
radio up. A parallel alarm monitor was also triggered to notify
Support personnel of the degradation and to begin their
investigation. Figure 1, 1a below also shows additional analytic data
that show that the end customer was not only experiencing degradation
but also specific directional packet loss from the source monitoring
probe to the end customer site. By employing this data and being able
to triangulate data from other (secondary) diagnostic tools, not
depicted here, the company's Support personnel were able to identify
the source of the disturbance and to notify the competitor of the
interference. By properly managing their environment, by engaging in
this project, the company was able to identify and resolve an issue,
at the onset, as opposed to dealing with an on-going issue which
would have resulted in the painstaking use of a Spectrum Analyzer for
interference isolation, not to mention the current and future loss of
revenue due to potential client loss and reputation damage.
figure 1.
figure 1a.
Slack Consulting 07.2011
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