The PALLADION Suite has a large set of monitoring capabilities that allow to properly operate IMS, LTE and pre-IMS networks.
KPI Engine
PALLADION provides KPIs and metrics for the entire network, and also for individual network devices. The standard set of KPIs includes active calls, CAPS, failed calls, Session Establishment Ratio, Ineffective Registration Attempts and many more. Additionally, PALLADION provides the unique feature of extending the metrics dynamically, based on individual requirements. For example, it’s perfectly possible to have the amount of calls longer than 38 minutes, or the calls that are failing with a particular status code. There are millions of combinations available for the dynamic KPIs, making PALLADION a future-proof system, as you never know which issue you’ll need to track tomorrow.
PALLADION’s extensible KPI system can be used to analyze problems in real-time, as all values are instantly available, even newly created dynamic metrics. The data can be viewed and used internally on the PALLADION interface, trigger alerts in the alerting subsystem or be exported using SNMP to existing Network Management Systems.
The PALLADION KPI engine is the most advanced and flexible today on the market. With millions of combinations of parametrized metrics, you will never miss a metric you want to know from your NGN deployment.
Network Device Monitoring
As PALLADION operates on application layer network data, it can gain valuable information not only about users, calls and other applications, but it can also analyze the functionality and performance of the deployed network devices in an independent and meaningful way. There’s no better way to monitor the status and performance of a CSCF, Session Border Controller or Media Gateway than to look at the actual processing of messages. The PALLADION system provides what we call passive monitoring: it checks the proper processing of network messages in real-time. As soon as there is an error in processing, a large latency or unprocessed packets, it can generate an alert.
This allows you to work on the problem and verify a solution immediately, and can be faster than relying on the operational parameters reported by the device, because even though a server can have good memory, CPU and disk state, it can still suffer a problem that prevents it from functioning.
Passive monitoring can be combined with active pinging on the transport and application layer for even more reliable results. Device performance metrics and alerts can be exported to existing SNMP-based network management systems.
Trunk Monitoring
The proper operation of interconnection trunks are critical for NGN operators, as a failure or quality degradation can result in immediate revenue losses and SLA issues. PALLADION can monitor KPIs, individual calls, audio quality, codecs used and so on for each trunk individually. Trunks can be identified in many ways, based on a flexible mechanism in the PALLADION system.
Alerting
Almost any network, user or device condition can be used to trigger an alarm in the PALLADION alerting engine, allowing you to quickly react on existing or upcoming problems. The combination of KPIs, individual user information like firmware version, and network device information like transit times give operators a unique coverage of potential problems. Alerts can be processed within PALLADION, sent by Email or be handed over as a SNMP trap to any network management system. With the scripting API, PALLADION can also trigger 3rd party system to take some appropriate action in case of an alert. For example, a provisioning server can be instructed to update a faulty firmware version on a customer CPE which has just been connected to the IMS network. Operators can thereby easily implement self-healing functionality with PALLADION.