Maintaining and improving service quality for customers is becoming more important as service providers strive to differentiate. Conducting an impact analysis before prioritizing and responding to outages quickly and effectively is paramount. Being able to identify and communicate with customers affected by network faults and planned maintenance is also important.

Impact Analysis for unplanned and planned outages

Network operation centers can become under intense pressure when large numbers of faults are reported. Root cause analysis can filter out thousands of alarms to identify the one or two underlying problems. But having done so, the next step is to prioritize which of the many current faults should be dealt with first and whether workarounds exist.

Impact analysis, based on a thorough and accurate knowledge of network topology, allows operations teams to assess which customers are affected. This includes both their number and importance – a large corporate site may have only one main service but affect service for hundreds or thousands of employees.

And it’s not just for fault conditions either. Planned maintenance, where downtime should be minimized, can take account of standby servers and redundant routes. Careful consideration, based on sound understanding of the network capabilities, can allow many maintenance activities to pass unnoticed.

Correlating customer issues with network faults

Many network operators find it difficult or impossible to link customer complaints with the underlying network faults. When customers call they can’t be told how quickly service might be restored or given progress reports as repairs get underway. Correlation between internal network faults and those customers who are affected help identify those VIP clients and enterprise customers affected. Where commercial SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are in place, prioritization and tracking of faults can be achieved.

Keeping customers well informed and prioritizing which customers are dealt with first reduces the commercial impact of outages and provides a competitive advantage.

High quality, highly available network services help you differentiate your offering from the competition. But to provide these services, your service assurance must cover the many organizations, systems and processes spanning the network, services and customers.

These various OSS domains are all relevant across many different telecom technologies