Telecom Capacity Management System (maxABILITY)

Network capacity management is an analytical process that encompasses business requirements, application traffic patterns, costs, and needs. It requires an intimate knowledge of the network, its configuration, topology, and the relationships between the different layers and components. Typically this information is collected by various components within an OSS suite, and in order to see the big picture the data must be consolidated via OSS component integration. The results can then be used to implement changes necessary to ensure that network capacity is aligned with the business objectives.

Common shortcomings of Capacity Management Systems are:

• No centralized GUI for monitoring network status
• Lack of network monitoring statistics during high network congestion and router overload
• Network overload results in poor performance;
• Network congestion adversely impacts QoS
• Insufficient resources lead to degradation in quality of service

maxABILITY provides accurate real-time analysis of the network’s capacity using both current and projected traffic demands. Its integration with other systems within the OSS suite such as ticketing, planning and inventory enables comprehensive network management. MaxABILITY includes a number of prebuilt adapters that provide rapid integration with any operational support system:

• Southbound integration layer supports integration with the network management system to provide direct network monitoring via CORBA, CLI (SSH / TELNET), TL/1, LDAP and SNMP protocols
• Northbound Adapter Framework integrates performance, inventory, and provisioning functions with maxABILITY
• Database schema supports all critical network element (NE) performance indicators
• Reporting Service provides functionality for generating predefined and custom reports for information collected and managed by the maxABILITY framework
• Computes traffic trends using linear, polynomial, exponential, logarithmic and combined regression. Analyzes the capacity of the network using both current and projected traffic demands

CyberVision’s maxABILITY uses individual adapters to collect NE’s fault messages, performance, and inventory data. maxABILITY’s adapters capture network events into event files. The event files are then processed into a generic format understood by the Capacity Management System.

maxABILITY functionality can be extended to enable wireless capacity management, allowing mobile users to track key wireless resources such as tower and platform space. The collected data is stored in the capacity database for further processing.

Key features:

• Determines if the network supports current traffic demands and identifies any bottlenecks that exist
• Understands how much additional traffic the network can support and what sections of the network need to be upgraded when traffic volume increases in the future
• Explores alternatives such as hardware upgrades, IGP metric tuning, traffic engineering, and QoS implementation
• Predicts the impact of network or server migration, branch office expansion or data center consolidation on network performance and application response time
• Validates proposed topology and configuration changes prior to deployment
• Collects information about network traffic over a period of time. Collected data includes source and destination traffic flows, bits per second, and packets per second
• Analyzes traffic flow, network addressing, and routing configuration to determine how application traffic moves through the network and what the aggregate impact is on network capacity
• Configures link utilization and throughput thresholds to meet SLA requirements. Network capacity can then be visualized using color coding
• Predict future traffic requirements based on existing network traffic patterns. To trend traffic as part of the capacity planning analysis, maxABILITY examines network traffic and modifies each traffic profile

CyberVision’s maxABILITY improves overall network performance by recommending network upgrades before SLA violations occur, ensuring the network is able to support business objectives. maxABILITY’s tight integration with other OSS enables it to efficiently handle many use case scenarios, such as providing real-time NE’s interface load monitoring through a centralized GUI, or sending up-to-date reports for the planning department. Bottom line: with CyberVision’s maxABILITY, you can right size your network, maintaining SLA’s with the minimum amount of network resources.