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About the Tivoli Netcool Technology
Since the beginning of the development of its range of products, Micromuse has chosen to cover most of the infrastructure systems which might have a need for its Fault Management and Service & Business Assurance products. It is important to note that Micromuse was an independent vendor in this area, offering nothing but software packages. As was expected, the company has developed software capable of monitoring and securing different technological platforms, as well as environments comprised of equipment produced by various manufacturers. The original idea was to develop a powerful platform to integrate monitoring and security requirements in all applications, from various IT environments to telecom provider infrastructure systems, keeping an equal distance from all equipment vendors and offering independent support for all of them. This original idea gave birth to the core product – Micromuse-Netcool/ObjectServer (Netcool/OMNIBus) – a platform capable of achieving cross-domain centralization in the monitoring of complex multivendor environments. Years of development brought many improvements in the core product itself and led to the emergence of the extensive Netcool product series based on this original concept. While the industry competition often followed a different path, developing special solutions for specific needs (e.g. IT management, service providing management etc.), Micromuse remained loyal to its concept which has achieved great success – after a relatively short time, Micromuse became a leader in the field of Fault Management and positioned itself among the top two players in the area of Service and Business Assurance. This kind of approach brought many advantages to Netcool users: first, a centralized platform for monitoring of various infrastructure systems allows highly efficient operationalization of system maintenance personnel – all necessary information from different systems as well as problems are presented in a single location – and enables teams to have "at the glance" insight into the current status of the equipment and to achieve close cooperation in problem-solving. This had proven to be the main selling point in the coming years, at the time when IP technology penetrated many new areas creating complex interdependence of various technologies which proved poorly compatible with distributed management. Micromuse's visionary approach allowed advanced analysis and correlating in a centralized location, continuing the tendency of operationalization of personnel activities and rapid reduction of OPEX factors. Apart from obvious technological advantages of these systems, there is also a significant financial operationalization, evident not only in the reduced OPEX, but also CAPEX factors. Specifically, monitoring and maintenance of different infrastructure systems – IT, service providing etc. – does not require acquisition of different solutions, but only a single cross-domain platform capable of managing huge and complex infrastructures. This is especially true today, when every infrastructure constitutes a highly complex combination of IT elements, network elements and many others. Not every infrastructural expansion requires purchase of new monitoring solutions; most often it is possible to achieve their efficient integration into the existing system, which means reduced CAPEX. Micromuse's concept is shown in the following picture.
Tivoli Netcool product range is comprised of the following products:
- Tivoli Netcool/OMNIBus
- Tivoli Netcool/Webtop
- Tivoli Netcool/Internet Service Monitors
- Tivoli Netcool/System Service Monitors
- Tivoli Netcool/Impact
- Tivoli Netcool/RAD
- Tivoli Netcool/Precision IP
- Tivoli Netcool/Precision TN
- Tivoli Netcool/Neusecure
- Tivoli Netcool/Proviso
Hierarchical organisation is shown in the following picture:
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Tivoli Netcool/OMNIBus
Netcool/OMNIBus is the core product of the Netcool product family. Technically, it consists of the following three products delivered as an integrated functional unit:
- Tivoli Netcool/ObjecServer
- Tivoli Netcool/Probes
- Tivoli Netcool/Gateways
Netcool/Probes are an integral part of Netcool/OMNIBus products; they represent a set of lightweight data collectors comprising the first hierarchical level of Netcool architecture shown on the picture 3. Called "probes" in the jargon, they are independent and distributed alarm collection agents for various objects of interest. Their duty is to separate data centralization layer (which the second part of Netcool/OMNIBus products – Netcool/ObjectServer) from the data collection layer.
This integral part of Netcool/OMNIBus products is the core element of the product itself and each Netcool implementation. Netcool/ObjectServer is an "in-memory" server, a destination point for all alarms arriving from probes and monitored equipment, as well as a point of origin of all analyses and various representations of data. At the very beginning of the Netcool product family, very demanding requirements were defined with regard to the central server. They were derived from the most complex infrastructures to be monitored. Some of the most important requirements were the following: server's capability to survive large data loads from the monitored infrastructure, the ability to serve many concurrent connections with users, as well as the uncompromising speed. These strict demands have prompted Micromuse not to implement any of the standard servers available in the market (Oracle, Microsoft, Informix...), but to independently develop the heart of its system.
 As a result of these efforts, ObjectServer – an SQL based server – was created, together with Micromuse-specific technologies which would prove to be an excellent match for such roles. Specifically, it is a "memory resident" database technology (server database). Netcool/ObjectServer contains databases which are located in the system's RAM memory instead of the hard disk, unlike conventional servers. This approach enabled the server to achieve the necessary speed and high performance.
Another important feature of the ObjectServer – the ability to filter alarms in the server – undoubtedly greatly contributed to the market success of the product. In demanding environments like telecom providing, the number of alarms to be centralized can be staggeringly high (100,000 a day). Out of this number, many alarms are caused by the same problem, or indicate the appearance and immediate disappearance of a problem at the same source. The main task of the server intended to centralize monitoring of complex environments is to recognise these alarms and filter them. The ObjectServer is technologically equipped to detect repeated alarms from the same source, as well as alarms appearing and being immediately solved at the source. This filtration technique, as well as other methods, allow rapid reduction of the number of alarms and their efficient centralization. Several hundred thousand alarms per day can be effectively reduced to few thousand and even few hundred alarms per day.
These abilities, and many others which we have no space to describe in this review, have made the ObjectServer the leading industry platform for Fault Management. In the configuration offered in this tender, for the lot 2, a single ObjectServer was included. The platform is absolutely capable of achieving the required volume of monitoring with high performance, and allows easy and efficient future upgrades and expansion. Here we must mention a great advantage of ObjectServer compared to other industry solutions: its strength and probe-based data collection concept make scalability and expandability its key features in complex environments with changing infrastructure and continuously appearing new demands in the area of monitoring. This is certainly one of the main factors of the market success of Netcool.
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Tivoli Netcool Webtop
This product is an integral part of almost every Netcool implementation. Having in mind that ObjectServer, as the central server and point of origin of all presentation data, has no integrated web server and is capable of accessing only local data, a special product was developed with advanced functionality concerning the presentation of data; it is also the system's web server. There were many conceptual and technical reasons to separate presentation functions from data consolidation functions. One of them is the need to relieve the functional load of the ObjectServer. Also, Tivoli Netcool Webtop is usually installed at the separate hardware platform for the reasons of system performance, as well as increased security. It is often available from the whole corporate network (for example, in the service providing environment) and even from the Internet, making the data available to administrators and operators at any location while protecting the central server of the ObjectServer system from possible security risks.
Tivoli Netcool Webtop allows complete system administration, as well as an insight into ObjectServer alarms with all options included in the local graphical interface of the central server. It is also possible to create web pages of arbitrary design and incorporate content from the ObjectServer and alarms using various visually attractive methods. Advanced possibilities to filter information from the ObjectServer are also available, allowing creation of web pages for all levels of infrastructure management from operators all the way to the top management.
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Tivoli Netcool/Impact
Netcool/Impact extends infrastructural IT management to the business process level by determining the effect of alarms in Netcool/OMNIBus to business processes, services and users.
The Netcool/Impact application offers immediate answers to the following key questions:
IMPACT ANALYSIS. Netcool/Impact indicates to NOC operators which networks, users or business processes are affected by the alarm. It can also automatically warn the users before the application or a service are affected, allowing them to plan their next steps. Results of impact on users and business activities are reflected in the Netcool/OMNIBus Eventlist.
EVENT RESOLUTION. Netcool/Impact application can track the time necessary for technicians to notice the alarm and solve the problem. When an alarm appears, Netcool/Impact can notify a technician by email, pager etc. If the technician does not respond, the system will escalate the alarm throughout the organization. Also, Netcool/Impact can deliver the history of dealing with the problem and its escalation and automatically stop the escalation when the problem is solved.
For example, after receiving the alarm that a router's port is malfunctioning, the Netcool/Impact application identifies the affected business unit and locates the persons responsible for administration of the router. Then it identifies the person in charge, sending the information about the alarm. If no answer is received within the specified period, Netcool/Impact system escalates the alarm throughout the organisation.
POLICY MANAGEMENT. Netcool/Impact allows certain off-the-shelf pointers for event resolution; they can also be defined and executed by operators themselves. Sending an email to the administrator and updating journal fields may be one of the most simple pointers. The policy may be easily defined using documents and diagrams like text and HTML files or other data sources describing actions necessary to solve alarms. Also, the Netcool/Impact application can reply to operators' demands for certain information. For example, an operator may request Netcool ObjectServer and Netcool/Impact to send available documentation, user data and all other information regarding the specific alarm.
Business Value
Tivoli Netcool/Impact architecture
The Netcool/Impact application includes a three-layer architecture with client, server and database layers. The server receives data from the database layer, performs complex data processing tasks and delivers required information to the client. This layout allows placement of processing power exclusively at the server and implementation of easily deployed thin clients.
The server processes clients' demands and alarms in real-time, enabling real-time updates and continuous synchronization of information served to clients. Tivoli Netcool/Impact server functions include the following:
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Escalation management
- Ability to start and stop services
- Interface for external data sources
Information collected by the Tivoli Netcool/Impact DSAm from various external sources is sent to the Tivoli Netcool/Impact server. Tivoli Netcool/Impact DSA collects policy information located in relational databases, texts, LDAP services or other applications. The administrator points the adapter to the database to identify the pattern and select relevant fields.
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Tivoli Netcool/Precision for IP
Tivoli Netcool/Precision for IP is one of the products from the Netcool "add on" series, outside of the basic monitoring core solution. It can be integrated to enable specialization for specific applications. In this case, the specialisation applies to IP networks – the core platform is universal for all application areas – and the added value is achieved in the form of advanced monitoring of IP networks.
Tivoli Netcool/Precision is a solution intended for advanced monitoring of IP networks. Apart from monitoring, Netcool/Precision includes tools for creation of advanced alarm correlations in IP networks, as well as the tool for autodiscovery of network topology and its graphical visualisation together with one of the product's crucial characteristics – topology based correlations and RCA-Root Cause Analysis techniques. Basic features of this product are the following:
1. IP Network Autodiscovery
This feature is extremely important as it allows implementation of tools for advanced monitoring of IP networks. After the installation of the product, or as needed during its exploitation, it is possible to launch IP Network Autodiscovery. The product will automatically perform network analysis, using standard SNMP, telnet and other methods to discover the complete network topology, and collect inventory information about the objects in the network. The collected information contains the following data:
The collected information is stored in the internal database to be used in alarm analyses and topology based correlations. Also, this information may be exchanged with external inventory systems via a special interface.
It is important to note that Precision is capable of network rediscovery, which means that every change in the network topology will be automatically detected and topology database updated. Discovery and rediscovery processes use elements marked on the previous picture as Discovery Engine, SNMP and Ping Pollers.
2. Visualisation of the Topology and GUI-based Monitoring
This feature is based on the previously described network autodiscovery. Tivoli Netcool/Precision for IP includes a GUI interface delivered as a plug-in for the standard web server of Netcool systems – Netcool/Webtop – which allows visualisation of discovered topology and monitoring of equipment. All alarms collected in the ObjectServer and analysed in the RCA engine are logically correlated with other alarms in the system and can be presented to users. Equipment icons are coloured in the code colour of the alarm with the highest emergency level received for that element, and it is possible to create a complete list of alarms for any or all elements. This interface is shown in the following picture:
3. Root Cause Analysis-RCA
Root Cause Analysis technique is certainly one of the product's most important features. In short, this technique works as follows: it is a known fact that a single failure in a network, like link or router malfunction, may cause an avalanche of seemingly unrelated alarms from various parts of the network. The operator cannot easily identify the root cause of the problem. This kind of operational procedure may negatively affect the elimination of problems because of the prolonged and painstaking diagnosis. Also, there are many alarms in the system which needlessly overload the server and may even confuse the operators working on the solution. Netcool/Precision is capable of correlating these alarms on the basis of the network topology stored in the topology database. The RCA engine which executes this technique is capable of finding and marking as critical the true "root cause" among the multitude of seemingly unrelated alarms. At the same time, other consequential alarms are suppressed and marked as not critical or even deleted. In this way, the system operator works more efficiently, with clearly identified "root cause" problems within the system and clearly marked irrelevant consequential alarms which would otherwise impair the analysis of the problem. This method allows immediate diagnosis of the problem, after which its elimination now depends on the efficency of repair teams, increasing operational productivity and positively impacting the OPEX. It is also important to note that this method allows additional filtering of alarms after the initial filtering in the ObjectServer, achieving additional reduction in the number of consolidated alarms.
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Tivoli Netcool/Reporter
Tivoli Netcool/Reporter delivers a critical functionality, representing a logical addition to Tivoli Netcool/OMNIBus and intended for review of network alarms data after their removal from the in-memory, real-time database of the Tivoli Netcool ObjectServer. Tivoli Netcool/Reporter efficiently collects, stores, analyses and displays alarms from the ObjectServer to assist IT managers and operators to understand and improve the performance of the network.
Business Value
Tivoli Netcool/Reporter improves overall advantages of Tivoli Netcool investment, helping companies to:
PLAN THEIR NETWORKS INTELLIGENTLY. Tivoli Netcool/Reporter assists network managers in proactively identifying investments in equipment, network or personnel.
AVOID EXPENSIVE ALARMS AND FAILURES. Tivoli Netcool/Reporter displays an intelligent overview of the alarm flow, discovering hotspots so that IT managers can intervene before more serious problems emerge.
EFFICIENTLY DIAGNOSE PROBLEMS. With a click of the mouse, IT managers can access journals and detailed tables, as well as the history of alarms which allows them to solve problems quickly and effectively.
IMPROVE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY. Tivoli Netcool/Reporter collects events data in accordance with personnel availability, helping IT managers to efficently assign tasks, plan and distribute personnel.
ACHIEVE SYNCHRONIZATION. Reports about the availability of equipment, measurement of the personnel reaction time and other measurements contributing to internal and external communication between service levels.
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Netcool/Proviso
Highlights
In the fiercely competitive service provider marketplace, traditional services are commoditized and competition and customer demand are driving prices downward. To stay at the forefront and to retain and attract new customers, it is crucial to continually introduce next-generation services and do so with the highest levels of availability, reliability and performance. End-to-end performance management, especially when offering bundled services, is essential but challenging.
In the past, service providers were forced to manage a multitude of data points to maintain quality - a substantial burden on already overtaxed IT operations. Now, a new consolidated, service-centric view is emerging to increase service agility and deliver quality while helping to reduce costs.
Netcool®/Proviso® delivers a single tool with carrier-class performance management, monitoring and reporting.
Its scalable, flexible architecture enables you to effectively consolidate management to increase agility and help cut costs.
Improve service quality with a comprehensive view
The proliferation of products and services that providers offer every day - and continue to introduce to the marketplace - makes it imperative that you have a view of all the services you provide, end to end. Netcool/Proviso gives you the ability to monitor a variety of KPIs from multiple technology domains - including voice, video and data, network, hosts and applications - across varying lines of business under a "single pane of glass" view, so you can effectively monitor service quality across your infrastructure.
Netcool/Proviso also allows you to trend KPIs, predict and avoid problems - or access data in real time for troubleshooting.
The flexible data collection and modeling capabilities of Netcool/Proviso allow you to easily pull from a variety of sources, including:
Netcool/Proviso allows you to manage your services as needed, immediately address service issues, plan for fluctuations in demand and traffic flow, and seamlessly react to unforeseen changes. This helps reduce the strain on your staff due to monitoring and maintenance of multiple, separate tools.
Adhere to SLAs
In complex environments, operators need more than just a complete view of the environment. Netcool/Proviso has dynamic data aggregation and reporting capabilities that enable you to correlate data across domains to provide a service-centric view. You can organize KPI data to model the service, create service-centric views and manage that data against SLA thresholds, by customer or by service.
It also lets you drill down to real-time resource monitoring for fast troubleshooting. By predicting, avoid-ing and rapidly resolving service level violations, you are helping avoid costly penalties for violating SLAs.
For organizations offering tiered services, Netcool/Proviso lets you offer varied service levels, using business logic to support your SLA thresholds and report packages.
Consolidate operations support systems (OSS) to speed services to market and simplify service monitoring
Staying a step ahead of the competition is imperative — and complicated. Many service providers are streamlining and consolidating OSS to support and roll out new services more quickly. This is challenging in the face of separate service add-ons, mergers, acquisitions and globalization. Netcool/Proviso delivers the scalability and flexibility to aggregate and centrally view this information, enabling you to more quickly support new services and future technologies, including:
- New devices.
- New service models.
- New reports.
Netcool/Proviso helps you transition away from inconsistent, stand-alone performance monitoring systems to leverage on demand reporting capabilities that offer immediate insight into your infrastructure from all angles. OSS consolidation also presents tremendous potential cost savings, by minimizing your monitoring tools, the complexity of your monitoring process and the amount of valuable staff time needed.
Facilitate IP-virtual private network (VPN) service offerings
Increasingly, companies use IP-VPNs to securely extend coverage and reduce wide area network (WAN) costs. Yet the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and quality of service (QoS) technologies needed to facilitate IP-VPNs and VoIP bring about two significant challenges: monitoring new virtual elements such as label switched paths (LSPs) and class of service (CoS) policies, and monitoring metrics such as latency and packet loss.
Netcool/Proviso facilitates IP-VPN service offerings by:
- Delivering a library of out-of-the-box monitoring support from leading vendors, including Alcatel, Cisco, Huawei and Juniper Networks.
- Supporting end-to-end measurements for latency and packet loss.
- Correlating data into views per service, customer, site and other user-defined criteria.
- Giving you robust change management capabilities.
Netcool/Proviso gives you visibility into QoS and applications, and correlates that data to help with capacity planning and problem avoidance.
Quickly roll out VoIP services and effectively manage quality
Many service providers are rushing to offer VoIP services - both to take advantage of cost savings that this technology affords and to roll out popular service offerings and bundles. But effectively monitoring VoIP quality has typically been difficult at best. Netcool/Proviso offers the flexibility to manage VoIP across multiple domains to give you a holistic picture of capacity, usage patterns and problems in your network, and help ensure service quality. Domains include:
- Service delivery platform (SDP): media servers, application servers, media gateway controllers.
- Central office: media gateways, session border controllers.
- Customer premises equipment (CPE): multimedia terminal adapters (MTAs), mobile phone quality of experience (QoE) monitoring.
Netcool/Proviso provides insight into VoIP key quality indicators (KQIs), including:
- Voice quality: mean opinion score (MOS), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), delay, echo return loss.
- Call signaling: call completion rate, answer seizure ratio (ASR), drop call rate, tear down delay.
- Network impairments: jitter, packet loss, unsequenced packets.
- Network diagnostics: local area network (LAN), router and access congestion, and impairment due to jitter.
Superior monitoring capabilities deliver a complete picture of VoIP quality and usage, allowing you to quickly roll out new VoIP services. Later, you can use reports to immediately gather real-time data on service and voice quality, volume fluctuations and so on — and fine-tune as needed.
Robust reports help improve service quality
A functional and secure Web portal for global reporting across multiple services and technologies allows you to gain a comprehensive overview of your infrastructure, aid in troubleshooting and even get warnings about potential problems - as well as use this information to prevent future problems. Reports can be generated historically or in an on demand way and include both baseline calculations and forecasting. And by integrating Netcool/Proviso with your inventory and provisioning systems, you can use it to improve inventory accuracy and models, as well as enrich reports with customer and service information.
The flexible architecture enables you to extensively customize reports to meet business objectives. Reports can be scheduled to e-mail directly to your customer or account team for review, so you can react to quality issues before they become customer satisfaction issues.
Netcool/Proviso on demand and real-time reports help manage capacity, avoid and resolve problems.
Deliver accurate, customer-facing reports in a protected fashion
User-friendly, customer-facing reports in Netcool/Proviso help demonstrate that you are consistently providing high-quality service, which aids in retention and cross-selling. The software continuously aggregates data to put accurate, current reports right at your customers' fingertips - even on bundled services. Sharing this information with customers when they need it helps assure end users of ongoing service quality, which helps bring a faster end to potential disputes. Strong change management features ensure that even if resources change midmonth, your reports remain accurate and secure.
Self-service features contribute to the zero-touch operation of Netcool/Proviso. Through the portal, customers can:
- Rename resources to make reports easier to read.
- Configure and initiate end-to-end latency tests.
- Activate real-time, one-second poll and scroll monitoring.
- Export data in CSV format for analysis in their own tools.
Bundle advanced reporting capabilities with premium services or charge separately for them.
Help reduce operating costs and headaches through automation
Maintaining monitoring tools has historically been an administrative headache. As changes to the network are made or new customers and services are provisioned, they must be reflected and adjusted in the monitoring tool. If not, that service might be monitored poorly, or not at all. Netcool/Proviso helps enhance your change management capabilities by delivering built-in policies that can automatically detect system changes, further conserving time that can be put to better use managing the network instead of the toolset.
Netcool/Proviso change management automatically helps preserve SLA and reporting accuracy, and conserves administration time by reducing manual updates for:
- Resource adds, deletes and changes.
- New or changed customer and service deployments.
- Router reboots that force the reindexing of all the interfaces.
- Failovers.
- Automatic grouping of resources by location, business unit or other criteria.
Netcool/Proviso configures itself to monitor as changes are made, providing a single, service-centric view. When an event or fault occurs, Netcool/Proviso can then send a notification to Netcool/OMNIbusTM, which uses the information to help you deliver continuous uptime of services and applications. Detected changes can also be sent to the inventory system for reconciliation.
Powerful architecture delivers broad capabilities
The robust architecture of Netcool/Proviso includes modules and application packs that deliver complete monitoring and reporting and help you save on operating costs and capital expenditures.
Netcool/Proviso modules
- Netcool/Proviso DataLoad - discovers resources and collects detailed data.
- Netcool/Proviso DataChannel - continuously calculates KPIs and KQIs for customer, service, site and other user-defined groups.
- Netcool/Proviso DataMart - the central repository for all data that automates daily additions, changes and deletions of resources, customers and services.
- Netcool/Proviso DataView - generates security-rich, real-time reports, from customer-facing to granular, internal views.
Application packs
Choose from a broad range of application packs to extend these modules and get out-of-the-box discovery, monitoring and reporting, including:
- Infrastructure: Alcatel 5620NM, Cisco, Cisco WAN Manager, Huawei, Juniper Networks, Riverstone, ATM, Frame Relay.
- Transmission: Ciena, Huawei T2000.
- MPLS and Metro Ethernet: Alcatel 5620SAM, Cisco, Huawei, Juniper Networks, LSR, TE.
- Access broadband and MSAN: Alcatel DSL, Huawei N2000 MSAN, Fujitsu MSAN, Nokia D500, Redback SE800.
- QoS and latency: Cisco CB QoS & IP SLA, Huawei Ping, Juniper Networks RPM, DISMAN Ping.
- Flow: Cisco NBAR, IP Multicast, Huawei Netstream.
- VoIP: ACME Packet, Alcatel, BRIX, Convedia, Cisco IPT, Nortel CS2K & MG9000, Radcom OmniQ, Siemens HiQ, Tekelec.
- Applications: Netcool/ASMs™ and Netcool/SSMs,™ Radius client/server accounting and authentication, IneoQuest IPTV.
Conclusion
Netcool/Proviso helps you deliver superior service quality while contain-ing your costs. It's the performance management solution with the scalability and flexibility required to deploy next-generation services and help you maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Netcool/Proviso provides you with the flexible, global view that you need to bring points of data into a consolidated display that is customer and service-centric.
And, when combined with other products in the IBM Tivoli® Netcool portfolio, customers gain a complete service management solution for end-to-end fault and performance monitoring.
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