White Paper

Service AssuranceSolutions forMulti-System OperatorsJim Lochran, VP–Solutions StrategyCommunications, Media and Entertainment

June 2006

Table of ContentsCA Approach to Unified and Simplified Management .............................................................................................................................. 3Operational Transformation ............................................................................................................................................................................ 4CA Service Assurance Solution for MSOs ....................................................................................................................................................4Fault Management ..............................................................................................................................................................................................6Performance Management ..............................................................................................................................................................................8Service Management ........................................................................................................................................................................................12Security Management ......................................................................................................................................................................................14Conclusion ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................15About the Author ..............................................................................................................................................................................................16

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Cable Operators are faced with the daunting task ofdelivering an ever increasing range of services over anextremely complex mixture of technologies. The result isan increased dependence on systems for customer serviceand infrastructure management, ranging from customercare, to billing and provisioning, to service assurance. Theadvent of high revenue services like Video-on-Demand (VOD)and must have services such as VoIP have extended thecomplexity of these Business Support Systems (BSS) andOperational Support Systems (OSS), and highlighted theneed for a set of infrastructure management toolssignificantly more simplified and unified than ever before.Inside any major Multi-System Operator (MSO) NetworkOperations Center, one would ordinarily find severaldifferent management consoles in use, each managing adifferent facet of the overall service delivery infrastructure.These consoles evolved as the network was transformedfrom a video distribution channel into a full service, 2-way,IP-based multi-media service delivery platform. Thetransformation required the MSO to deploy managementsystems from each device vendor in order to manage thatsegment of the service delivery infrastructure. Disparateconsoles provide MSOs with only a limited view into theperformance of their service offerings and have led to avariety of challenges, including:

• Silos of information between legacy and next generationsystems

• Operator information overload

• Inability to understand the impact of outages and/orservice degradation on subscribers

• Dependency on manual processes for restoration andmaintenance

CA Approach to Unified andSimplified Management CA (formerly Computer Associates) addresses thesechallenges with its Enterprise IT Management (EITM™)strategy, providing solutions that unify and simplify themanagement of enterprise-wide IT. Its SPECTRUM® andeHealth® solutions have a rich history in fault and per-formance management, with over 100 patents in keytechnology areas such as Infrastructure Modeling,Technology Relationship Mapping, Root Cause Analysis,Fault Isolation and Integration of Network and SystemsManagement. CA solutions extend from OSS serviceassurance to back-office BSS assurance along with a richportfolio of security and systems management solutions.CA solutions are used by some of the largest MSOs inthe world.

The SPECTRUM and eHealth solutions have been servingthe MSO needs since 1995 and have continually evolvedto support the range of emerging services the MSOsneed. The expansion continues today and now includessolutions for:

• DOCSIS 2.0 • Wireless Extension

• Voice over IP • Digital Wireless

• Video on Demand • Commercial Service

• Digital Simulcast • Fiber Services

• HFC Plant Management • IPVPN

• Return Path monitors • Voice

• End of Line Monitors

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Operational Transformation A key step in addressing the challenges before MSOstoday is the adoption of a transformation model (Figure 1)for service assurance operations. The need for such atransformation is driven in part by the rising complexity ofthe services being delivered such as voice, and the risingdemand for increased service levels associated withpremium services. As a result the current operationsmodel needs to be transformed from an Active, manualdriven process to a fully integrated service centricBusiness Driven model in which problems are anticipatedand addressed before customer services are interrupted.

Functionally, this transformation requires alignment acrossthe various MSO organizations (Engineering, Operations,Marketing, etc.) with the goal of providing a higher levelof service to the customer. Alignment is crucial since therequirements of a service-centric operation cannot beaddressed solely at the operational level. For example,service development / engineering must include manage-ability as part of its service definition, and ultimatelyvendor selection, in order to ensure that the end productcan be properly managed. In addition, operation musthave operational support systems and business supportsystems in place that can quickly adapt to new technol-ogies and services to implement the appropriateinstrumentation to deliver a service-centric approach.

The remainder of this paper will focus on the operationalsupport system, specifically the service assurance toolsrequired to facilitate the transformation to a service-centric operation.

CA Service Assurance Solutionfor MSOsThe MSO infrastructure is a constantly evolving collectionof technologies that introduces many unique managementchallenges. Point tools and proprietary solutions have beenimplemented over the years to provide basic visibility intothe health of the infrastructure. Unfortunately these toolsare often not integrated and provide little correlationbetween their management domains. This forces opera-tions to perform complex correlations manually and makeroot cause determinations based on their experience andknowledge. The end result is an inefficient and costlymonitoring solution that can be quickly overwhelmedduring a major outage.

CA’s service assurance solutions, SPECTRUM and eHealth,were developed from the ground up to be multi-vendor,multi-protocol and multi-technology platforms. With thesesolutions, CA offers the industry’s broadest catalog forinfrastructure modeling with support for over 1000 uniquenetwork elements and a wide range of specific cablestandards. The following is a partial list of supported cableindustry specific standards and infrastructure elements:

Standards• High Speed Data

– DOCSIS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0

• Voice over IP– PacketCable

• Outside Plant– SCTE Hybrid Management Subcommittee

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4 Business Driven

3 Responsive

2 Efficient

1 Active

• Fragmented

• Non-integrated

• Ad hoc manual processes

• Manual correlation

• Root cause

• Limited automation

• Performance management

• Availability management

• Proactive

• Process driven

• Highly automated

• Predictive operations

• Capacity planning

• Trend based thresholds

• Common operating environment

• Business impact analysis

• Service correlation

• Automated response

• Customer experience

• Automated SLA reporting

FLEXIBILITY

AG

ILIT

Y

Figure 1. Operational Transformation.

In addition, technologies such as Wi-Fi, 3G, and opticaltransport technologies are also supported within theseproducts. With SPECTRUM and eHealth, CA provides aunified view across the infrastructure that allows an MSOto eliminate a number of the point tools and proprietarysystems in favor of an integrated solution that leveragesembedded management intelligence. With these solutions,MSOs can improve service and reduce costs through rapidproblem resolution, proactive service assurance, predictivecapacity planning, and effective service level management.

At the core of the service assurance solution is a conceptcalled Business Service Intelligence (BSI) – a methodologyfor understanding the relationships and impact of theinfrastructure on business services. BSI deliversTechnology Relationship Mapping, Impact Analysis andRoot Cause Analysis that enables MSOs to evolve theirnetwork operations from being tactically reactive tostrategically proactive, while improving service qualityfrom a customer and business perspective. The solution isbased on a broad, mature product offering that can bebroken into three functional domains: Fault Management,Performance Management, and Service Management(Figure 2).

Infrastructure Elements• Backbone Transport

– Juniper, Cisco, Nortel, Lucent

• Return Path Monitoring– Acterna, Trilithic

• High Speed Data– Arris, Cisco, Motorola, ADC, any DOCSIS compliant

CMTS or CM

• Voice over IP– Cisco, Nuera, Nortel, Siemens, Oasys, CedarPoint,

Tollbridge

• Video on Demand– SeaChange, Concurrent

• Plant Monitoring– Tollgrade, AM Communications

• HMS Compliant Power Supply Monitoring– Electroline, AM Communications, Tollgrade

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Proactive fault analysis and notification

Intelligent event management system

Root cause analysis

Topology relationship mapping

Fault Management

DOMAINS

Proactive thresholds

Reporting and trending

Transaction monitoring

Capacity Planning

Performance Management

Service Impact

Customer Impact

Service Correlation

Service Level Agreements

ServiceManagement

Figure 2. Cross Domain Management.

Fault ManagementSPECTRUM allows operations staff to isolate outagesand degradations and identify root causes behind them.SPECTRUM provides proactive monitoring by directlyinteracting with the managed elements to gather healthand availability metrics. SPECTRUM also provides theability to passively monitor elements through the receiptof SNMP traps or events from the elements directly or viaother monitoring applications. These polled or receivedevents provide critical information that SPECTRUMleverages to determine the root cause and the impactof an outage.

One of the key components of SPECTRUM’s fault manage-ment capabilities is the ability to map the relationshipsbetween infrastructure elements (Figure 3). SPECTRUMprovides an industry leading discovery capability thatallows the system to automatically discover theinfrastructure element and their interdependencies.

SPECTRUM uses the model of the infrastructure todetermine the root cause and impact of faults and/ordegradations. SPECTRUM’s modeling engine detects andresponds appropriately to outages in the environment bygenerating a root cause alarm and suppressing thesymptomatic conditions associated with an outage. Inthe above example an element has failed within theinfrastructure, as a result several of its neighbors areimpacted. Without SPECTRUM’s modeling capability aNOC operator may be flooded with outages. WithSPECTRUM, that operator gets a single alarm for thedevice outage with the symptomatic alarms suppressed.This capability helps the NOC improve service and reducecosts by allowing operations teams to immediatelyidentify and troubleshoot the root cause of an outage.

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Technology Relationship MappingDiscovery and mapping of the interdependencies within the infrastructure

SPECTRUM

SNMP

HFCSyslog

TL1

COBRA

DWWM

MPLS

DOCSISServers

Multicast

XML

VPN

ATMWLAN

VLANOptical

EthernetApplicationsEvents

Frame Relay

Proactive bi-directional

communication

Figure 3. SPECTRUM Technology Relationship Mapping.

In addition to SPECTRUM’s out of the box modelingintelligence, customers can add their own experience tothe system through pre-built flexible event policies (Figure5). SPECTRUM includes a number of these policies likeevent rate, pairs, coincidence and condition. In the aboveexample, an event rate policy is used to identify an alarmingcondition on the router. In this environment it is withinnormal operating parameters for a router to receive four

client connections detected and rejected per minute, sobased on the customers policy no alarm will be generated.However if that rate were to increase to twenty events perminute then SPECTRUM will generate an alarm on therouter. Operations teams can improve their efficiency bytuning the system to decrease the number events oralarms that the group needs to evaluate.

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Events: Client connection detected and rejected

4 Events/1 Minute=

4 Events/1 Minute=

Figure 5. SPECTRUM Event Management.

BTS (primary)

HFC Cloud

BTS (secondary)

192.168.152.31CiscoDV

192.168.152.204CiscoDV

192.168.152.152CiscoDV

192.168.152.153WS-C6509

192.168.152.150UBR_7223

192.168.152.160SBV4200

192.168.152.155SBV4200

HFCCoax_Segment

Figure 4. SPECTRUM Topology View.

In addition to outage reports, SPECTRUM can also providecomprehensive availability reports (Figure 6) for allmonitored assets. These availability reports provide allof the details regarding any down or degraded time. Thereport below demonstrates an overview of the devicesavailability including uptime, downtime and maintenancetime on the right and on the left is a break down of theoutage time. In addition the user can “drill into” theoutage details and see each outage event including theroot cause and duration.

Performance ManagementPerformance management is comprised of two maincomponents, response time monitoring and elementperformance. Each component plays a critical role inunderstanding the performance of the infrastructure andits impact on the services being delivered. Response timemonitoring involves measuring and reporting on theperformance from the end users perspective, and acrossthe network infrastructure. Element performance involvesmeasuring the performance of the network and serverinfrastructure components to determine current healthand to predict future health. Each of these componentsplays a crucial role in determining the health and avail-ability of services. For performance management, CAaugments SPECTRUM’s asset management capabilitieswith eHealth’s historical and predictive performancereporting and capacity planning.

Performance Management starts with understanding theinfrastructure from an asset inventory standpoint (Figure 7).SPECTRUM’s Technology Relationship Mapping capabilityfeeds the asset reports to ensure timeliness and accuracyof the asset inventory. This inventory information is usedby eHealth for periodic polling (every 5 or 15 minutes) ofcritical performance management data from the monitor-ed infrastructure. Advanced performance managementalgorithms and reporting mechanisms are applied to polleddata in the eHealth database to produce a wide range ofreports, for audiences ranging from technical operationsand engineering staff to line of business owners.

eHealth provides comprehensive performance analysiscapabilities to base line performance and provideproactive notification through SPECTRUM when keyperformance indicators are outside of expected values.This flexible solution can also report on other performanceindicators like errors, discards, retries, etc. The screenshotbelow is an example of a report dashboard that providesthe Modem details (Total, Active, Registered) per upstreaminterface as well as the CPU utilization for a given CMTS(Figure 8).

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Figure 7. Network Asset Report.

Figure 6. Availability Report.

9

Figure 8. eHealth Performance Report.

The rapid introduction of new services into the marketprovides MSOs with a significant capacity managementchallenge. They need to ensure adequate capacity existsto capture the revenue from market demand for new service,but they also need to control capital expenditures bytiming purchases to when they are really needed. eHealth’sapplication of advanced algorithms to historical utilizationand performance data allows MSOs to closely matchbandwidth to subscriber demand. In the “ProvisioningLead-Time” report below (Figure 9), capacity plannersselect two parameters to make this type of informeddecision. First, they choose provisioning lead-time — thetime delay between when they order additional bandwidthfrom their provider and when it is available for use. Then,they select the upgrade point, or the pre-defined thresholdfor when they need additional capacity to be available.The report then provides a listing of all of the locations inthe network for which additional capacity needs to beordered today in order to avoid violating the upgrade pointduring the ensuing provisioning lead time.

CA’s unified approach to service assurance provides asingle vendor solution for monitoring both the networkinfrastructure and the services that are delivered over thatnetwork. For example, a leading VOD vendor sends anSNMP trap every 30 minutes that includes criticalstatistical information regarding the health of the VODservice for a particular Market. The solution receives thetrap, extracts the statistical information and updates aweb based report that shows the current number of activestreams, streams in error, OK streams and the totalnumber of streams. This provides an easy use, selfmaintaining VOD market report that key stakeholderswithin the MSO can leverage (Figure 10).

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Figure 9. eHealth Capacity Planning Report.

Figure 10. VOD Report.

SPECTRUM is also able to take this information andgenerate an alarm if the percentage of VOD streams inerror violates a defined threshold allowing the Operationsgroup to proactively address the issue.

Another important aspect of performance managementis response time monitoring. This involves leveragingresponse time testing capabilities built into leadinghardware vendor’s firmware that allows a managementsystem to configure, threshold and report on synthetic

transactions across the infrastructure. CA solutionsimport response time data directly from these devices forboth fault and performance management, and can alsoaccept events from 3rd party test agents from vendorssuch as Brix Networks®, Tollgrade®, Acterna® and othersfor voice quality testing. Data from these systems are thenapplied to the appropriate infrastructure elements withinSPECTRUM and eHealth for analysis and correlation(Figure 11).

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Figure 11. Service Performance Management.

HFC Plant

Voice qualitytest agent

CMTS

SST Gateway

BTS10200Soft Switch

Backbone

MGX 88XX

Service ManagementSPECTRUM and eHealth extend from infrastructure faultand performance management by providing a compre-hensive view into the health and availability of criticalservices delivered over that infrastructure. Today’sMSOs take a customer centric approach to operationsmanagement, so the assurance tools on which they relyneed to provide a service view in addition to an infra-structure view. SPECTRUM’s correlation engine has beenextended to allow an MSO to define services on a pernode or service area. These nodes or service areas canthen be collected into regional or market views thatculminate into a national service view if desired (Figure 12).Service views are accessed via the SPECTRUM OneClickService Dashboard which provides an at a glance view intothe health and availability of services at each level of the

service hierarchy. The solution also leverages an inno-vative condition based correlation engine that evaluatesevents from disparate sources across management domainsto identify the root cause of an outage and identify theservices impacted.

The health and availability of services are driven bySPECTRUM’s fault and eHealth’s performance monitoringdata. SPECTRUM is able to interpret the events occurringwithin a Node or Service Area across the different servicedomains and determine the underlying root cause of theoutage or degradation.

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CMTS, Cable Modems

Provisioning

HFC Plant

Network Transport

DNS, DHCP, SMTP

HSI

SERVICE MANAGEMENT

FAULT ANDPERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Softswitch

Media and signaling Gateways

Provisioning

Messaging systems

Call quality measurements

HFC Plant

VoIP

Headend

Node

Settop Boxes

Transport (NSG)

Servers

Content Applications

HFC Plant

VOD

Figure 12. SPECTRUM Service Modeling.

As an example, SPECTRUM may process the followingevents:

• VOD server (high tune errors service are S1567)

• Harmonic NSG (Weak signal… RF output errors QAM…)

• Return Path Failure (Node ID 135…)

• CMTS event - High % of cable modems go offline(interface 2.1 feeds node sa135, sa136, sa137)

These events evaluated individually appear to indicatea failure within the infrastructure; however by beingaware of these events as a whole, SPECTRUM is able todetermine the root cause of the outages as well as theservices impacted by the outage. In the above example,

SPECTRUM identifies a Return Path failure as the rootcause of this outage and tags the other events assymptomatic of the root cause event (Figure 13).

From the Network Operations (Figure 14) perspective, onewould see a single alarm within the OneClick alarm viewand in the details view see the services impacted by theoutage as well as the symptoms identified by SPECTRUM.From the Service Desk analyst user or managers perspec-tive, the Service Dashboard would indicate that a serviceis down and its impact to the business. They can alertcustomer support of the outage so they are prepared tohandle customer calls. The analyst assigned to the problemcan drill into the current outage to see the root cause andtake the immediate corrective steps to restore the service.

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Figure 13. Service Dashboard.

Figure 14. SPECTRUM OneClick Console.

Security ManagementAs today’s MSOs allow their customers automated accessto web-based content for self-service billing, customer-care, and service ordering, security management is addedto the list of critical infrastructure management require-ments. Through its eTrust® line of products, CA provides abroad range of solutions for Identity and Access Manage-ment, Integrated Threat Management, and SecurityInformation Management (Figure 15). These solutions arebuilt on the same principles as its service assurancesolutions — multi-vendor, integrated, and highly scalable— once again providing the benefit of a single vendorsolution to multiple management needs.

Managing users and their access is no longer a simple taskin today’s complex business environment. Users’ roleshave expanded beyond the traditional enterprise userscustomers, suppliers and partners are now an integral partof an organization. Business partners require a trusted

relationship to execute business transactions. Public-facing websites and business processes exposed via Webservices must be protected from unauthorized access. Thecomplexity of identity management is further increasedbecause it must have the capability and capacity tomanage identities and security in different types of legacyand distributed systems and applications, including HR,ERP and supply chain management systems.

eTrust Identity and Access Management Suite provides asecure, open identity management platform. All of itscomponents are seamlessly integrated to maximizeefficiency and provide a foundation for additionalintegrations, greatly reducing deployment and enabling aquick return on investment. eTrust Identity and AccessManagement Suite leverages a high-performing X.500directory as its embedded repository. This LDAP V3-compliant solution enables you to take advantage ofdirectories, such as Microsoft’s Active Directory or SunJava System Directory Server.

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Iden

tity

and A

ccess

Threat

Security Information

ManagementM

anag

ement

Management

Delegated Administration

Virus Prevention

Spyware Prevention

Anti-Spam

Gateway Protection

Security reporting & auditing

Event Correlation

Visualization tools

Asset Discovery & Classification

VulnerabilityAssessment

Forensics

Compliance Mapping

Authentication

Authorization

Federation

Web Services

Provisioning

Password Management

SSO

Access Management

Self-Service

Figure 15. CA Security Management Solutions.

eTrust Identity and Access Management Suite providescomprehensive visualization and management of virtuallyall aspects of identity across the enterprise and federatedworlds (Figure 16).

eTrust provides identity and access management servicesto organizations that need to improve overall informationsecurity, enhance regulatory compliance, reduce costsand increase user satisfaction with their web-deliveredapplications. In addition to the security enforcementcapabilities, eTrust delivers administrative services thatautomate the management of a user’s identity lifecyclewithin the organization, from creation to modification, toeventual deletion.

ConclusionThe CA MSO solutions are helping many of the top tierMSOs deliver a higher level of service at lower costs totheir customers through proactive service assurance, rapidproblem resolution, predictive capacity planning, andeffective service and security management. As MSOs raceto deliver new bundled services ahead of their competition,the CA solutions have become an enabling technology byoffering greater insight into the capabilities of the infra-structure to support new service offerings. The result issuccessful launch of new services that are managed andsupported from day one.

The CA solution continues to expand in meeting theneeds of customers around the world. Recent enhance-ments like Multicast Management and Quality of ServiceManagement, critical technology participants in definingand delivering a service, extend the solutions view of theinfrastructure to support Digital Simulcast deployments.Enhancements like these come as a direct result of therelationships and interactions with our customers that helpdrive the roadmap for new features and / or enhance-ments. As a result, the solution continues to evolve anddeliver increased value to customers by supporting newtechnologies that yield revenue generating services.

CA’s integrated service assurance solutions provide thetools necessary to identify service degradations andoutages, yielding root cause information that provideoperations the actionable information required to quicklyrestore services. Its security solutions provide the meansby which operators can control user and customer accessto services, centrally manage threats, and take a holisticapproach to security information management.

To learn more about how CA MSO Solution can help youmanage what matters, please call toll-free in the U.S. at(877) 437-0291 or worldwide at +1 603-334-2100.

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Internet

IdentityAdministration Provisioning Access

Management

Help Desk

HR System

Directory

Auditing/Monitoring

Enterprise Infrastructure

Physical AssetsMobile Phone

BadgesPDA

Telephone

PlatformsSystems

System ServicesMainframesSystem Files

ApplicationsSCMERPSAP

Custom

Event Log

Supply ChainCustomersPartners

EmployeesContractors

Common Roles, Policies, Reporting, Workflow

Intranet

Figure 16. CA Identity and Access Management Suite.

About the AuthorJim Lochran has 10 years experience defining anddeveloping service assurance solutions for the telecom-munications industry inclusive of Wireline, Wireless andCable providers. Jim’s background is in development andsolution architecture within Aprisma ManagementTechnologies flagship product SPECTRUM. In this role,Jim lead several development projects focused onextending SPECTRUM’s scalability, technology supportand root cause analysis capability to address the needs ofthe service provider community. Currently, Jim is leading ateam of solution architects within the CA Communica-tions, Media & Entertainment business unit, focused onhelping CA’s Communication, Media and Entertainmentcustomers achieve their goals by providing solutions thatunify, simplify and secure the service delivery infrastructure.

Copyright © 2006 CA. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is foryour informational purposes only. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document “As Is” without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties ofmerchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document including, withoutlimitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages. MP303530606