IPTV has seen steady growth in the broadband market but with growth there are increasing challenges with customer experience management and overall quality of service. Some problems include:
“We have a large number of Set-Top-Boxes (STB’s) in one area that cannot boot-up.”
“Some of our subscribers are having video quality issues?!?”
“Some subscribers are encountering video quality issues in one particular channel?”
“A single STB is unable to boot-up?”
In the above problem scenarios, the root cause can be anywhere along the end-to-end service chain from the head end to the home. To determine the root cause there are many options but the question for the service provider is who can provide the most flexible solution which helps to transform their overall business operations.
- High Performance & Event Volumes - Once a severe problem occurs resulting in an “event or alarm storm” the single-threaded and processor bound architectures reach their limit. These applications sometimes lose alarms and metrics or slow down to process data.
- No E2E Network View - A NOC requires a topology view and generally alert displays are not the best way to visualize a unified network view. Plus often network topologies are not designed by operations but planned by engineering. There is often a disconnect in knowledge transfer.
- Effective Alarm Management, Reporting and real-time Analysis - Correlation, Suppression, and Reporting analysis tools are required which capture human expert knowledge.
- Real-time Monitoring - Performance Management systems sometimes do not handle real-time performance data where Threshold Crossing Alarms (TCA’s) can be triggered. Sometimes only historical data is captured and reported upon. Other solutions can only plot real-time metrics but again no TCA’s are triggered according to KPI/KQI formulas and thresholds.
- Complex KPI/KQI Definitions - Complex mathematical calculations are required so that formulas can be applied to KPI/KQI’s to be monitored effectively.
- Trend Analysis - Performance trends can often seem haphazard - hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly moving averages are required for effective monitoring of overall trends to be proactive.
- High Availability and lack of Fault-Tolerance - Management systems are still architected with primary and secondary HA clusters. Failover times are unacceptable.
- Lack of visibility to Service and Customer Impact - How to identify customers and services potentially impacted due to changes in the network, to analyze the root cause of problems impacting end-to-end services, to re-use service components as a reference for new service designs
Solution
A single Fault Management or Performance Management solution is not enough and will not provide a clear view into root cause analysis of IPTV solutions.
For IPTV a total Service Assurance solution is required.
OSSera’s IPTV probe partnership combined with OSSera’s Service Quality Management functions are required to resolve both Set-Top-Box, Middleware, Video Channel Quality, and other possible problems.
OSSera’s Unified Management and Data Modeling tool brings together all probe, event, and metrics into a single framework for fault, performance, service quality, and modeling of network topology for root cause analysis.
OSSera's OSS Explorer Platform is unique because of its multi-threaded symmetrically distributed architecture which can provide a 99.999% Fault-Tolerant Service Assurance monitoring solution.
There are different Phases that can be leveraged using this component based approach to End-to-End Service Assurance:
- Scenario 1: Probes feed data into the OSSera Service Assurance solution
- Scenario 2: Probes with Network Topology feed the Service Assurance solution. Network topology can be imported from an existing Inventory system.
- Scenario 3: Probes, Network Topology, and fault alarms can be gathered from network elements, Element Management Systems (EMS), or existing fault management systems via OSSera’s Data Mediation Platform (DMP).
- Scenario 4: Probes, Network Topology, fault events, and performance metrics can be gathered from network elements, EMS, or existing performance management systems via OSSera’s DMP.
Download our latest solution brochure to see how OSSera can help.
