Effectively monitoring the PSTN Bearer traffic
Tracking VOIP Service Provider’s PSTN bearer trunk utilization is growing rapidly with the fast growth of their customer base. Trunks represent T1s which carry basically 24 DS0s/CICs.
These CICs represent the state of the voice channel and basically the voice capacity. If for whatever reason these CICs are not available to carry voice traffic the Service Provider’s Voice network would be critically impaired as OFFNET or PSTN calls will not go through. Again this depends on the percentage of CICs affected.
Another important need to monitor these CICs is because Service Provider routes certain categories of OFFNET calls like emergency, long distance calling, toll free calling directory assistance and so on, on specific set of trunks. So if these particular trunks are affected then that whole category of service is down.
Summary email reports are one form of output for the abnormal CIC states, the same data can be used to generate web/html reports which are updated on pseudo real time basis. These reports are to be used to create a Trunk Monitoring Dash Board. This monitoring dash board would greatly improve Voice Network Operations, the Dash Board would give view into the health of the voice trunks on a readily basis. The figure 6-9 shows this report.
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An alerting mechanism can be setup to send an email/epage when certain configured thresholds of trunks go local block (LBLK) or remote block (RBLK) in between two monitoring periods.
Also this captured data can be used to generate XML reports that can plug into web browsers or other aggregation tools to show the monitoring information.
The ideas presented so far have the same key theme, create specialized reports and monitor them through dashboards. This specialization cost time and money but the positive impacts are immediate to the overall VOIP service.
