ESP Managed Service - 4net Technologies · PDF file4 4net Technologies – ESP Managed Service ESP Continuity Manager Continuity Manager assists with rapid systems recovery in the

4net TechnologiesESP Managed Service

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4net Technologies – ESP Managed Service

ESP Managed Service4net’s innovative cloud based Managed Service offering, ESP,is a hosted, pay per user service delivered through our web portal that can help you to improve business performance and service availability through:

Visibility of assets - allowing you to understand how your communication assets are being used, and what you need to do to maximise business benefit.

Service Transparency – real time information about service affecting issues and what is happening to address them.

Proactive support – we can optimise the availability of your environment by early action on threatening trends, preventing business disruption caused by service outages.

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Service Modules4net’s ESP Managed service is an integrated toolset that is delivered as a hosted solution to our customers. It has been designed to complement existing support strategies as a straightforward overlay – eliminating the need for a plethora of servers, licenses and additional overhead.

ESP Availability Manager

ESP Capacity Manager

ESP Configuration ManagerESP Continuity Manager

ESP Release Manager

ESP Change Manager

ESP Service Desk

It is delivered with several service modules providing critical functions for proactively managing communications applications. We can mix and match these modules to meet the needs of individual customers.

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ESP Continuity ManagerContinuity Manager assists with rapid systems recovery in the event of a catastrophic failure. Continuity Manager regularly collects and stores vital back up data which is held in a secure off-site infrastructure and can be used as part of the recovery process.

ESP Release ManagerRelease Manager mitigates risk by managing software version control.

ESP Change ManagerChange Manager maintains a common view of system changes. Although communications administration applications hold change logs, our solution allows us to capture all changes through a single tool making it the perfect tool for audit purposes and problem resolution.

ESP Service DeskService Desk provides a single interface for communication, escalation, reporting, and customer interaction.

ESP Availability ManagerAvailability Manager goes beyond alarm monitoring by performing corrective actions and greatly enhancing availability. This is achieved by a continually growing knowledge base which links known problems with proven actions to quickly prevent business interruption.

Our Managed Service resolves as many as 90% of issues without human intervention, reducing repetitive engineering effort while increasing availability for customers.

ESP Capacity ManagerCapacity Manager provides capacity information of customers’ systems enabling you to forecast future resource needs. Capacity reports are aggregated from multiple sources and simplified into an easily understood format.

Capacity Manager delivers a valuable insight into hardware and software assets, network usage, internal resource utilization and individual component performance.

ESP Configuration ManagerConfiguration Manager provides a real time view of a communications environment, providing valuable data for future forecasts, diagnosis and planning.

Configuration Management information is stored in a database and includes hardware assets, license volumes, IP endpoints, firmware and software versions.

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ESPThe business benefitsTraditional manual audits of an organisation’s communication assets have a number of shortcomings.

Firstly they rely heavily on labour-intensive investigation, collation and review which contributes to increased cost, delay and inaccuracy.

Secondly, the information only remains accurate for a short period of time, because enterprise platforms constantly change in sympathy with the business.

Finally a manual audit only uncovers the fact that resources are configured and administered on a system. The true value lies in understanding how the resources are actually being used.

Reporting Group Reports included Benefits

Server Infrastructure – OS Free Disk Space – OS Memory Usage – OS Processor Occupancy – Application Processor Occupancy

– Identify potentially severe problems before they impact the business. – Plan for future growth.

Core Contact Centre – Audio Groups – Announcement Board Storage – Announcement Last Play Requests – Announcement Play Requests – Announcement Port Usage – Agent report

– Analyse announcement capacity; – Optimise caller experience – Improve operational efficiency – Capture agent activity over prolonged time period. – Identify agent performance and training issues.

Traffic capacity – CLAN usage – IP Network Region usage – IP Telephony H.323 Signalling – IP Telephony Media – Media Resource throughput – Processor Link – TDM Bus utilisation – Tone Receiver utilisation – Trunk Group usage – Trunk Group trend

– Identify and act on bottlenecks and congestion areas that may be restricting business and revenue. – Recognise areas of excess capacity and

therefore eliminate unnecessary spend on hardware / software support and maintenance. – Achieve more accurate budgeting for upgrades. – Identify potential problems before they impact

business.

Hardware and Software (licensing)

– License report – License usage trend – Hardware – Firmware Versions (Hardware and handsets)

– Avoid business constraints caused by inadequate license capacity – Reconcile spare parts inventory. – Identify possible firmware level and

recommendations

Users and stations – Extension usage – Station report

4net ESP addresses these shortcomings by automating the audit process, delivering visibility of an organisation’s UC assets and their utilisation over time.

4net ESP reconciles configuration data with activity data providing the most accurate view of which assets are actually in use and how they are being used. This uncovers assets that on the surface may appear to be legitimate, but are in fact redundant, resulting in unnecessary cost for the business.

4net ESP is particularly useful for customers who are looking to upgrade, re-architect or rationalise their UC networks.

Getting the basics right at the outset of a UC deployment or an upgrade delivers demonstrable financial benefit on your capital and operational spend.

4net ESP is a comprehensive,automated audit for unified communications systems, especially where assets are distributed across numerous sites and are servicing multiple business units.

4net ESP provides rich visibility of the configuration, capacity, and utilisation of UC assets and provides over 20 detailed capacity and configuration reports.

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Appropriate Level of CapacityThe proposed 4net ESP service is deployed as a service into your telephony infrastructure and runs for a configurable period of time (usually a minimum of 1 month).

The implementation takes just hours to install, configure and test. Once testing is completed, the service is left to gather information and initial reports are available within 24 hours.

Whilst the service is running, a number of site visits are undertaken by accredited 4net engineers to ensure physical recommendations are in place at the main sites.

By employing the 4net ESP service, the amount of time spent on-site by engineers is dramatically reduced and also ensures that the information gathered is correct and up to date.

Requirements4net ESP utilises a locked down, secure server that will be installed within the customer premises.

The server requires a dust free environment with a 240 VAC, 50-60Hz power source and LAN connection. Connection to the cloud computing service is also required and the network will need to allow outbound TCP/IP connection on the secure HTTPS port (443).

Full service requirements will be available on request.

Security4net ESP uses industry standard encryption to retrieve the data from the supported equipment and transport this to the cloud computing platform.

The appliance has an internal firewall and only allows incoming data traffic on specific ports and protocols necessary for the role.

These include:

– 80 TCP – for customer specific web alarm reporting

– 162 UDP – for SNMP trap information

– 514 UDP – for syslog error logging

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Sample Reports

Announcement CapacityMeasures the number of Announcement Ports used on each Announcement Board over selected period of time. Also indicates maximum available port capacity.

– Identify over an extended time period the actual announcement usage on a board by board basis

– View potential issues with audio group configuration

– Demonstrate the inherent capability to conference multiple callers onto a single announcement port

– Highlight potential over subscription when announcement boards are used as music sources

– Use as an indicator of other potential problems

In this configuration the announcement board in the port network is used as a music source. Communication Manager has the inherent capability to conference many calls onto a single announcement port, meaning very efficient use of resources.

However these configurations need to be carefully managed as music is called so often and from so many different call scenarios that the announcement board can easily be oversubscribed. Over subscription means queue announcements may not be played and can lead to unexpected caller experience in the call centre. Again, supporting evidence of this was also captured in the event log.

– Identify announcement capacity issues.

– Mitigate impact on customer experience.

– Assist Root-Cause-Analysis

– Verify using multiple information sources

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Announcement Board StorageCaptures announcement storage on each Announcement Board within a system.

A good example of the Announcement Storage report (below) immediately highlights a potential issue for a 4net ESP customer by highlighting a significant loading imbalance across multiple Announcement boards. This clearly shows some resources are more heavily loaded with recorded announcements (i.e. full) than others (almost empty).

The scenario illustrated by 4net ESP represents a potential area of risk to the contact centre. This further emphasises a cornerstone of 4net ESP – bringing information into view that has been traditionally very difficult (or impossible) to see in order to optimise system uptime and remove risk.

– Identify announcement capacity issues.

– Mitigate impact on customer experience.

– Balance system resources.

– Mitigate risk.

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Hardware CapacityThis report lists all the hardware, associated vintage and port utilisation sorted on a site by site basis. This means that the information is able to be easily extracted and interpreted without the need for in-depth technical knowledge.

4net ESP converts technical detail from many sources into a report that sorts and visually depicts the resources. This provides an easy to interpret view that is always current.

Through the use of historic data, 4net ESP enables visibility of rate of consumption of spare overhead for the audit period, and therefore may be able to forecast the timing of additional purchases. Reports are:

– Broken down on a site by site basis for easy interpretation.

– Available on-demand at a fraction of the cost of an onsite survey.

– Always up to date

– Can be run by staff without detailed technical skills.

– Able to be used to forecast very accurately when additional equipment will be required.

– Allows reconciliation of spare parts inventory required to provide support across the collective installed base.

– View rate of consumption of spare overhead.

– Maintain asset accuracy

– Assist with forecasting

– Reconcile spare parts inventory

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Suggested Software UpdatesThis report highlights the current hardware version and software version running on Communication Manager for hardware and handsets.

Using the in-built software library, recommendations are given within the report should a firmware upgrade be required.

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IP Telephony Media CapacityThis measures DSP usage, in Erlangs, over a selected period of time. Can select one or multiple network region(s).

Identifying traffic trends and the associated impact on IP Telephony Media capacity can mitigate otherwise unseen issues. Ensuring adequate resources are available in the right locations is vital for forward planning in IP environments.

– Identify over a time period actual Media Resource usage

– Accurately forecast when additional equipment will be required

– Tune resource locations so that TDM-intensive Port Networks are serviced correctly

– Use as an indicator of other potential problems

In this example we can calculate the exact number of VoIP (or DSP) resources required in IP Network Region 1. The daily peak of 3107 Erlangs of traffic requires 3130 VoIP resources. The CMDB (in this case exported to Excel) shows us that there are 18 x TN2602 Media Resources giving us 5760 VoIP resources, in other words plenty of spare capacity.

– Identify actual usage over extended period.

– Forecast capacity.

– Calibrate system resources to demand.

– Pre-empt other potential problems.

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License CapacityIdentifies license usage measured against license capacity for all licensed software CIs, by percentage, for a nominated date. A Licence Usage Trend report is also available, which can be useful for identifying immediate license capacity constraints. This can be used in conjunction with Availability Management to identify pending license capacity issues.

Tracks actual license usage over a given period.

– Can be applied all “Licensed Capacity” items

– Tracks maximum daily used versus maximum daily limit

– Trend over the time period for forecasting

The licence trend report below has been used to visualise the rate of consumption of Logged-in ACD Agents

This report is especially useful for large-scale enterprise and contact centre organisations with consistent business expansion.

This report enables the organisation to identify overall maximum license usage over an extended period, as against traditional manual capture of “snapshot” information.

– Track license usage over extended period.

– Identify capacity shortfall ahead of time.

– Prevent business-impacting situation.

– Can be used with any CM licensed facility.

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Processor CapacityMeasures key processor capacity usage broken down into various activities over selected period of time.

Tracks capacity of:

– Static processing

– Call processing

– System Management

Processor occupancy needs to be carefully monitored to ensure the hardware is operating within accepted tolerances. Processor capacity in excess of 70% in a Linux Operating System environment is not recommended and will have a detrimental effect on the performance of the application.

Although Call Processing itself is protected through process encapsulation within the Avaya Aura Communication Manager application, this only provides priority access to the processor. System faults can push processor occupancy to a point where updating adjunct applications and call processing is slowed. This can lead to unexpected behaviour of these applications.

Processor Capacity can be used in conjunction with Availability Management to immediately identify and notify in regard to this type of incident, allowing engineers to take steps to reduce loading before business is impacted.

In this example, processor occupancy is within recommended levels. If total occupancy exceeds 70%, engineering teams will be immediately notified.

– Detect capacity related performance issues.

– Pre-empt latent processor capacity issues.

– Notify engineers when thresholds exceeded.

– Identify main causes of processor loading.

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Processor Link CapacityTracks capacity of each Processor Link and CTI connection in terms of Message Rate (messages per second) over selected period of time. This can be applied to a single Processor Link or to multiple Processor Links.

One of the most common causes of third party adjunct application failures is the exceeding of maximum message rates on processor links. In these situations there will be no alarm generated at an SNMP or alarm log level meaning this sort of incident will normally be reported by the customer - with all of the inherent delays this brings about.

Historically the root cause of this type of problem is difficult to isolate as traffic figures are not stored long term.

In this example message rate is within recommended levels. If the message rate exceeds the predetermined threshold, engineering teams will be immediately notified.

– Detect capacity related performance issues.

– Pre-empt latent processor capacity issues.

– Notify engineers when thresholds exceeded.

– Identify main causes of processor loading.

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Trunk Group CapacityThis report measures actual trunk group occupancy in Centi-Call Seconds (CCS) over a selected period of time and can be applied to a single Trunk Group or to multiple Trunk Groups.

This is particularly valuable for identifying where traffic congestion issues may be evident and is also useful for comparative measurement of traffic between trunk groups.

– Capture information trended over time.

– Perform comparative measurements.

– Identify potential capacity shortfall.

– Detect imbalanced use of resources.

Tracks trunk group utilisation in CCS over a selected period of time. Measurements include:

– Maximum daily CCS

– Max possible CCS

– Moving average

– Trend over period of time

This is useful with forward planning and for growth forecasting.

Trending enables identification of future capacity issues so that appropriate planning can occur.

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Roadmap RecommendationAs part of the ESP offering, 4net will provide a roadmap to the customer , providing details on how the current issues would be resolved and how we would ensure continued monitoring and improvement of the service including:

– Availability

– Software and Hardware levels

– License capacities

– Trunk capacities

– Backup and Restore

– Security

– Upgrade options

4net ESP uses Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) - the industry-recognised best-practice IT Service Management framework. ITIL regards service management as a number of closely related and highly integrated processes.

Service Information Collected

Service Desk Administrative information, client portal, BP portal.

Availability Manager Error logs, Syslog, Alarm logs, ACM Events, Notification information, workflows.

Capacity Manager Historical performance data.

Configuration Manager CMDB, Configuration Item data.

Continuity Manager System backup files, Syslog files, Customer-defined files.

Release Manager Installed firmware versions, installed software versions.

Change Manager System change logs, Change Register.

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Availability Manager

– Operational efficiency

– Fault Self-Healing

– Service level enhancement

– Improved transparency

Availability Manager goes well beyond traditional alarm monitoring, automatically performing corrective actions which in turn greatly enhancesystem availability.

When an alarm is received, Availability Manager will automatically attempt resolution by running scripts against known problems from within its ever growing knowledge base. If an automated resolution is not possible, Availability Manager can then utilise the in-built, highly flexible workflow engine to perform a wide range of automated tasks - such as capturing log files for problem isolation and subsequent diagnosis by a service provider engineer.

Immediate benefits that can be expected from the deployment of Availability Manager include;

– Automation of fault resolution tasks, currently being performed manually.

– Provision of alarm alerts to service provider engineers and to customers.

– Immediate positive impact on customer SLAs.

– Availability Manager has been shown to resolve up to 88% of issues without human intervention, reducing repetitive engineering effort, while increasing systems availability for customers.

Configuration Manager

– Automated asset management

– Increased visibility and cost control

– Improved planning ability

Gathering configuration management data across multiple locations on a large scale is typically time consuming and complex as the data is scattered across numerous parts of an enterprise unified communications system. This can be a challenging and costly task, particularly in a geographically dispersed environment, each location with their own assets, such as IP telephones, gateways and media modules.

Configuration Manager simplifies and automates this function by continually collecting asset information from numerous system data sources, presenting it in a relevant and easily understandable way. Configuration Management information is stored in a Configuration Management Database and includes a complete picture of all Configuration Items.

Capacity Manager

– Proactive planning and resourcing

– More consultative client engagement

– Increased visibility of asset utilisation

Similarly, gaining visibility of on-going system, customer and user performance data and capacity information is difficult, if at all possible, to achieve for many customers and their service providers.

Capacity Manager greatly simplifies this aspect by automatically gathering and reporting on real-time and historical capacity information across the UC environment. This enables better forecasting of system resources, proactive management of customer requirements and potential for a more consultative engagement.

Capacity Manager also enables detailed analysis at the UC application layer – typical examples being announcement storage and usage reports, and the pending enhancement of Voice Quality Manager for real-time and historical QoS reporting.

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Change Manager

– Auditability

– Transparency

– Improved problem management

Managing changes to multi-site environments, especially where multiple administrators and multiple systems may be involved, can present added complexity to a UC operation. Furthermore, not having visibility of these changes contributes to increased business risk.

Change Manager helps to mitigate these risks by maintaining a common and long-term view of system changes. Although communications administration applications hold change logs, Change Manager allows the capture and review of all changes through a single user interface.

Change Manager is ideal for audit purposes and problem resolution, enabling. a well-defined and accurate audit trail. This level of auditability is essential in the event of outage caused by user or administrator error, and for highlighting training requirements.

The audit trail associated with Change Manager is also highly complementary to other security policies and practices.

Continuity Manager

– Risk mitigation

– Service level enhancement

– Improved business continuity

The ability to ensure accurate, current, secure and readily available backup data for customers is essential in the managed service environment.

Continuity Manager assists with rapid system recovery in the event of catastrophic failure. Continuity Manager regularly and automatically collects and stores vital back up data which can be used as part of the recovery process. Configuration data is held in a secure hosted facility and can be easily retrieved through the on-line portal.

This provides a significant level of reassurance to customers and delivers another level of reliability behind the service level commitments of the service provider.

Release Manager

– Improved ability to plan

– Reduction in software related issues

– Reduced cost in managing platform “currency”

In the increasingly complex UC environment, the potential for the introduction of problems is exacerbated by the distinct possibility of mismatched software and firmware across an organisation. This is especially prevalent in distributed UC systems where, for example, different batches of IP phones and hardware are introduced over time, each with different software / firmware versions.

Release Manager ensures service providers and customers are aware of the correct versions of software– both for business-as-usual and in the event of catastrophic outage.

This becomes especially important when such an outage necessitates reloading of precise releases of software, right down to specified patches and bug fixes.

Benefits typically delivered include a reduction in manual effort associated with identifying software currency, and reduced potential for product interaction problems typically incurred due to firmware mismatch.

4net Technologies Ltd, 3 Scholar Green Road, Cobra Court, Manchester M32 0TR

4net’s powerful combination of service excellence and technical expertise makes us the partner of choice for organisations who want to transform the way they communicate with customers, staff and stakeholders, reduce costs and gain competitive advantage.

Our Contact Centre, unified communications, managed services and telephony solutions are designed to address today’s complex business challenges, helping you to respond to your customer and staff requirements.

From simple IP Telephony Solutions to Virtual Contact Centres, from Unified Communications to Cloud Services, we partner with best in class vendors such as Avaya, Cisco and Shoretel to deliver a solutions portfolio that will address today’s changing workplace and build tomorrow’s future, making 4net the preferred communications partner for many businesses across the globe.

0333 323 0700 | www.4net-technologies.co.uk

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ESP Managed Service - 4net Technologies · PDF file4 4net Technologies – ESP Managed Service ESP Continuity Manager Continuity Manager assists with rapid systems recovery in the