Review of Telecommunication Management Network System (CBOSStmn) Operation

CBOSStmn was put to test operation at Uraltel back in July 2002. The product is used to centralize representation and management of operational data referring to CBOSS billing and most services, available from our company.
To date, TMN is used in the following tasks:
1. Monitoring of systems, responsible for provision of value-added services to subscribers, such as SMSC (CBOSSsms), IVR (CBOSSacc), Internet Customer Service (CBOSSics), Voicemail (CBOSSvmail), ICQ2SMS translator (CBOSSicq2sms), SMS chat (CBOSSchat), Remote Dealer (CBOSSisp). These products run under control of WatchDogEx that sends alerts over SNMP to the TMN server;
2. Monitoring of billing system requests processing by the switch, namely Switch Control and cbSwitch modules. Zero downtime here is of special importance. Even short-time unavailability of the service may lead to considerable delays in processing of customer requests. WatchDogEx module and BlockMak Watcher utility are responsible for the monitoring.
3. Monitoring of CBOSS billing operation. The module CBOSS Monitoring Parameters lists events that are reported to TMN. Specifically:
* Considerable delay in rating of CDR files, received from various sources.
* Excessive number of discarded records in rating of the above mentioned CDR files
* Long switch requests queue (in addition to item 2)
* Long report document generation queue. The documents are further sent to customers by fax or email
* Long subscriber SMS notification queue
* Operation of license and suspension servers
Timely notification of alarms allows correct the situation and prevent critical scenarios.

There are a number of capabilities that are underused, for example monitoring of Oracle tablespaces (currently CBOSS database monitoring is the responsibility of Oracle system administrator. TMN is used to track condition of the TMN database), scheduled ad-hoc queries to databases, etc.  There was no demand for such functionalities here yet, however, it would be interesting to learn more about what TMN has to offer.

Petrov A.I.
Head of IT Center