Service Assurance Application – Test what you have

Managing test and notifications of the end-to-end service topology

VPN customers are demanding more and more control over their outsourced services. They want to see that their solution is performing according to their expectations. In case of service impacting network conditions they want to be proactively notified on the communication device of their choice. This helps them to better manage their risk and business impacts and reduce their overall operational cost.

Service providers want to improve their ability to meet established service level agreements and better manage their liabilities by reducing service outages.

Elanti’s Service Assurance Application is designed to give customers and their service providers the means to effectively assure service availability.

Furthermore customers place significant value on the quality and speed of interactions with their network service provider. Typically, such interactions are inbound and reactive as the customer initiates dialog with call centers. This increases call volumes, call centre costs and customer frustration. Elanti’s Service Assurance Application is designed to pre-empt inbound calls and reduce overall call volume, resulting in an increase in customer satisfaction while reducing the operational cost to the service provider.

The solution allows VPN customers to define tests to probe their IT service and network infrastructure. These policy based tests permit the customer to configure various parameters, the frequency of executing these tests, the users and their channels to notify when these tests fail the customer’s defined criteria.

The Service Assurance Application provides the ability to perform tests on the network to determine the relative health of the service. The results of the tests are displayed in the network diagram provided through the Service Visualization Application. The tests can be performed from within the core network out to the network elements at the customer's business locations, and from within the customer’s VPN.

Service Providers can use the application to proactively send alarms and notifications to customers using their customers’ preferred notification channels.

The Service Assurance Application provides customers and service operators with the means for testing operational aspects of the various service elements that comprise each customer's individual business solution.

A Notification Application provides a centralized means of distributing messages, alerts and notifications according to policies developed by the users (both customers and service provider).

A Test and Control Server controls agents that appear on each supported customer VPN that is responsible for conducting tests and proxying control requests to service elements within the customer‘s business solution.

Solution overview:

Figure 1 Service Assurance Application

Figure 1 illustrates the interaction of the Elanti Service Assurance Application with the user and service provider’s infrastructure.

1. A customer, having successfully authenticated with the service management portal, and retrieved a visualization of their business solution, requests a test of a service element. A test policy is generated which determines the nature of the test and who should be notified of failure.
   
   
2. The Elanti Service Management System’s Service Assurance Application queries its service model and identifies the relevant service elements and the relevant agent to perform the test. The Service Assurance Application passes a control message to the assurance agent that causes the assurance agent to add the test to its schedule respecting the relevant test policy.
   
   
3. The Service Assurance Application agent conducts the test. If this is a periodic test the test is repeated according to the test policy.
   
   
4. Test results are returned by the assurance agent to the application. Test failures are passed to the notification component.
   
   
5. The notification component inspects the test policy and generates alerts according to the policy specified as part of configuring the test.
   
   
6. Alerts typically result in SMS messages or email messages, but may also result in more complex actions such as automated trouble ticket creation. All alerts are logged for reporting purposes.
   
   

The Elanti Service Management Systems’ Service Assurance Application allows customers and service providers to better manage their business risks. Automated tests and notification minimize total service outages resulting in higher service availability and reducing potential revenue loss.