Iris Performance Intelligence

Iris Performance Intelligence combines proactive network performance monitoring with in-depth real-time analysis and historical reporting to deliver the visibility needed to maintain Quality of Service and the profitability of the network

Your Challenges

Network operators need to be able to understand how their 3G and 4G services are performing end-end across their network. Can their customers access the network and retain their connections during a session? Did they have a positive experience? When there’s a problem, operators need to be able to isolate the root cause quickly and proactively before the customer experience is impacted. At the same time, operators need to be able to optimize finite network capacity and manage just-in-time deployment. Given the huge growth of data traffic on the network, network operators need to be able to understand the impact of traffic generated from new services on their current service mix.

How We Can Help

Iris Performance Intelligence’s real time analytics dashboard enables users to understand network element behavior, analyze network performance and impact and make informed decisions regarding performance in real time. The FastPath Quality of Service dashboard delivers immediate visual notification of any degradation in performance for specific services. It accelerates the identification and resolution of service-affecting issues by increasing visibility and verifying ticket resolution. FastPath enables carriers to align their troubleshooting effort with their business objectives by identifying the percentage of affected traffic that is customer-impacting, revenue-impacting and service-impacting.

Features and Benefits
 
  • Customizable KPIs enable operators to define their own KPIs and KQIs through XML models, removing unneeded information and reducing network analysis time and mean time to repair (MTTR).

  • Proactive network analysis isolates nodes that are performing poorly due to network configuration errors, congestion, routing, etc. This network analysis tool increases KPI visibility by indicating the top N contributing nodes/elements and providing logical connections between nodes.

  • FastPath Dashboard provides service alarms of degrading network performance on carrier-defined services along with a troubleshooting path.

  • Business Intelligence Reporting makes it easy to create new network analysis reports. Its model-driven approach means that adding a KPI to the system automatically makes it available in existing reports.

  • Policy Engine enables users to create alarms on all the KPIs, KQIs and dimensions available in the system. FastPath automatically reacts to the new network performance alarms.

  • KPI Exporting is model-driven so that new KPIs and KQIs are automatically available to export and carriers can choose which KPIs to export.

Applications

  • Manage Quality of Service for Premium-Level Services
  • Monitor and Benchmark Smartphones
  • Isolate Radius & DNS Errors Responsible for Intermittent Service Accessibility
  • Detect and Resolve Data Session Accessibility and Retainability Issues
  • Measuring Device Performance
  • Classifying and Measuring the Application Traffic for the Mobile Broadband Network
  • Determining Network Congestion
  • Characterizing Accessibility Issues When Users Cannot Make Calls
  • Identifying Service Failures (such as Emergency Services)
  • Detect Mis-configured nodes (DNS servers, HSS, Radius servers)
  • Identifying Network Retransmissions
  • Verify Policy-Based Quality of Service

Manage Quality of Service for Premium-Level Services: Operators can improve average revenue per user (ARPU) by offering subscribers varying levels and types of service. To deliver the promised services, operators must be able to prioritize dynamic resource allocation and manage Quality of Service negotiation in order to deliver higher data service performance for time-sensitive, premium rate services including high-resolution streaming video. Dynamic resource allocation requires visibility to compare the requested vs. the negotiated Quality of Service on a per application basis as well as the ability to accurately characterize the success rate of users in obtaining the requested Quality of Service. Iris Performance Intelligence ensures premium level Quality of Service performance by providing carrier engineers with ongoing identification of bottlenecks and visibility to application data rates. Iris Performance Intelligence also identifies provisioning and network congestion errors by mapping requested vs. negotiated Quality of Service on a per access point name (APN) basis. The visibility provided by Iris Performance Intelligence enables operators to group users into categories based on service plans in order to assess and proactively monitor specific premium service use. Carrier engineers can proactively identify and correct issues impacting dynamic resource allocation for premium level subscribers in order to avoid SLA penalties and litigation associated with missed expectations.

Monitor and Benchmark Next-Generation Devices: Kindle, iPad, Xbox are examples of devices that are purpose-built for specific applications and have different performance criteria and error tolerances than typical devices and laptops. Operators must ensure that they are building networks that can support these types of pure play devices effectively in order to maximize the customer experience. Iris Performance Intelligence enables the carrier device performance team to track accessibility, retainability and performance by device type and version. The device performance team can also to track top N worst devices by performance per node. These metrics enable the operator to isolate performance issues directly related to a specific device or wireless device. This makes it possible to prevent poor network performance for key devices in order to avoid negative impacts to key business-to-business (B2B) relationships and reductions in revenue generating streams. Initial users are often the most vocal about products and services so a poor first impression can have a lasting and negative effect on an established brand. Iris Performance Intelligence helps ensure early adopter success to protect the brand.

Isolate Radius & DNS Errors: Responsible for Intermittent Service Accessibility Subscriber access to a service or a specific URL is largely controlled by Radius Authentication and DNS resolution transactions. When Radius and DNS failures occur, subscriber access may be intermittent. Radius and DNS requests are typically distributed across many servers so it is often difficult to pinpoint when a specific server has not been provisioned correctly. When this happens, operators may receive a high number of calls to customer care, resulting in extended resolution times and customer dissatisfaction. Iris Performance Intelligence provides visibility to transactions by node/server (Radius/DNS, etc.), enabling carrier operations to track transaction successes, errors by cause code and latency distribution. Tracking at the transaction level by protocol reveals service accessibility failures and impacts to customer experience driven by excessive latency when accessing applications. This capability can also assist carrier operations in pinpointing specific nodes that may be over-subscribed. Visibility to provisioning errors by service and server can reveal the source of intermittent access issues and improve troubleshooting time and effectiveness with a guided path for preventative actions.

Detect and Resolve Data Session Accessibility and Retainability Issues: Accessibility and retainability issues can impact the subscriber experience and increase churn. Mis-configured devices and APNs often cause widespread failures and increased congestion of call control network elements. The proliferation of smartphones increases the risk of these types of failures. Quick identification and resolution of simple configuration and provisioning errors is required to avoid unnecessary revenue loss. Iris Performance Intelligence monitors transaction success by node (GGSN, SGSN, CGW, APN), enabling carrier operations to uncover specific accessibility-centric error cause codes including PDP context, attaches and session failures. Iris Performance Intelligence also provides visibility to excessive transaction latency and timeouts. Contextual and seamless drill-through capabilities help isolate issues to specific users in order to facilitate immediate corrective actions for simple provisioning errors. Operators can restore revenue-generation by swiftly identifying users with mis-provisioned APNs and launching corrective actions through OTA procedures.

Related Solutions

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