The technical scope is defined by the following multi-vendor components:
First, Alcatel-Lucent and Acme Packet, are both supported right out-of-the box by our VoIP End-User Monitoring Solution.
All that is required is to import the 'Alcatel VoIP Portal' and the 'Alcatel OXE Monitoring' built-in packages, configuring the IP addresses, the SNMP community, the user credentials for the interactive session and the collection method for the retrieval of CDRs. I personally prefer the so called 'ticket on the fly over Ethernet' method, as it allows gathering call data more rapidly than via FTP, where the buffering time is up 1 hour. For this proof-of-concept time is of the essence!
All that is required is to import the 'Acme Packet VoIP Portal' package and the 'Acme Packet Monitoring' packages, configuring the IP addresses, the SNMP community and the collection method for the retrieval of CDRs. I take this opportunity to praise the quality of the Acme Packet MIBs, which are very comprehensive and allow the retrieval of plenty of information about the operating status as well as the monitoring of the trunks – it is such a pleasure to use them! The customer demands a minute-by-minute monitoring in order to assess the load of the carrier trunks and of the trunks internal to the OXE. First, I show them the addition and setup of the packages, then, through the automatic discovery of the other network elements, I explain that it is possible to set thresholds for performance alarms, for example for the purpose of detecting heavy usage conditions for the carrier trunks. I also take the opportunity to point out that these measured values will allow us to take advantage of our solution’s extensive reporting capabilities, which are as important as its monitoring functionality. This is exactly what grabbed the customer’s attention, precisely because they had not thought about bringing up the subject of reporting for the purpose of this proof-of-concept. Why not, after all?
That's the part that took a little time to implement, because we didn't have a package built into the product available at the time. Fortunately, we had already studied this technology internally. Here is the "recipe" applied in this case for the creation of a new supervision package:
Time is running out so I need to focus on the essential points: provide measurements on the usage of the carrier SIP and IP trunks, as well as on the call quality, by means of tables, top-bottom rankings and capacity planning. I rely exclusively on the web interface to prepare the report: for each paragraph I select the desired functionality (tables, top-bottom rankings or capacity planning) and the equipment class to apply it to. Then, for the automatic creation of the reports, I select the frequency (e.g. weekly, monthly or quarterly) and the distribution list for the emails, if required.
After only a few months of using the ServicePilot supervision software, here are the results that the customer's voice teams were able to achieve:
Before they started using ServicePilot, and because of the complexity of their telephony environment, the Voice team had a hard time finding the cause of VoIP quality problems. Indeed, they could not correlate the availability and performance of different brand elements. ServicePilot is capable of collecting data from Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Skype Enterprise, Oracle and other technologies, giving them access to key indicators such as :
This brings them the following benefits:
__-Although the members of the Voice of the Customer team are each specialists in a particular technology, the simplicity of ServicePilot's dashboards allows them to carry out a complete and rapid diagnosis, even on equipment of a technology of which they are not experts. __
- They can now monitor their entire telephony perimeter from a single software package, and track call degradation to their cause by seamlessly switching from one technology to another.
However, resolving existing incidents is not enough to ensure optimal service quality. Before using ServicePilot, the Voice team did not have a capacity planning tool to predict the future performance of its infrastructure elements. With ServicePilot, they can anticipate saturations up to 3 months in advance, thanks to projections calculated on the basis of historical data for each resource. The customer in question estimated that he reduced the total number of incidents by almost 20% thanks to this feature.
Although SIP is used by many large enterprises, and today considered one of the most widespread VoIP signalling protocols, it has security weaknesses that leave its users at the mercy of hackers. Before using ServicePilot, our customer had already been the victim of several attacks that had resulted in significant financial losses (abnormally high telephone bills and indirect costs related to the interruption of VoIP service).
The ServicePilot solution, in addition to providing the company with global visibility of its infrastructure and greater responsiveness to resolve incidents, has enabled it to block and prevent this type of attack.
First and foremost, it is important to know that ServicePilot collects indicators from all of the customer's infrastructure equipment (Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Lync, Oracle, Sonus). In particular, our supervision solution collects, on SBCs and PBXs, CDR information concerning the volume of calls made.
In addition, the customer was able to configure the tool so that its data is displayed by geographic area, and create alerts with customized thresholds, to detect abnormal changes in call volume.
It was after deploying ServicePilot that the Customer Voice team received an alert indicating that one of its SBCs was experiencing a sudden increase in outgoing international call volume (see the "London" area below). Indeed, hundreds of calls were being made from an unusual IP address and passing through one of the group's Oracle SBCs.
It is thanks to this precise diagnosis that the Voice team was able to modify the configuration of the SBC in question in order to block the IP from which the attack came.
Above all, the ability to prevent and diagnose incidents more quickly has reduced the company's Mean Time to Recovery and the workload on its Voice and Help Desk teams. As a result, the customer saw an automatic decrease in the total cost of resolving incidents, as well as the costs associated with degradations.
The capacity planning functionality described above has also resulted in significant savings for the Voice team. Indeed, the analysis of the future use of its trunks has led to a halving of the number and cost of subscriptions to its SIP channels.
In the past, the Voice team's telephone system has been the victim of fraudulent attacks. Unfortunately, without the right tools, it was difficult to detect, block and prevent attacks. Shortly after deploying ServicePilot, the customer received an alert indicating that one of his SBCs was experiencing a sudden increase in outgoing international call volume (see "London" area 2 screenshots above).
Indeed, hundreds of calls were being made from an unusual IP address and passing through one of the group's Oracle SBCs. ServicePilot transmitted this information thanks to its configuration based on the collection of SIP traffic on the group's SBCs, on alerts with customized thresholds and on the display of call volume by geographic zone.
It is thanks to this precise diagnosis that the Voice team was able to modify the configuration of the SBC in question in order to block the IP from which the attack came.
ServicePilot allowed the customer to create a personalized dashboard called "Morning Check" that gives them a clear daily view of incidents requiring their attention. In addition to facilitating decision making, these dashboards can be generated as PDF reports sent to local technical teams. According to the Director of Telecommunications of the client:
"We are quickly familiar with the ServicePilot solution, and are now able to create dashboards and reports that respond to each new problem encountered, in addition to supervising new equipment. Moreover, despite the complexity of our environment and the large number of users of our system, ServicePilot requires only one hour of maintenance per week."
Using ServicePilot, the customer, a major European car manufacturer, benefited from the following: