Experience Manager: Real-time Voice, Video, and Telepresence Service and Performance Management
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Experience Manager Datasheet View PDF - (259 KB) |
Experience Manager is a comprehensive solution for real-time IP voice (VoIP), video conferencing, and Telepresence service and performance management. A modular architecture, Experience Manager provides targeted and essential functionality driving efficient service management for IT operations, support and business management.
Please click on the individual icons below to understand how Experience Manager delivers monitoring, alarming, alerting and reporting for real-time IP voice, video and Telepresence services.
Psytechnics Experience Manager is a software solution that installs on industry standard hardware running Linux or Windows, comprising an Experience Server and a number of IP Engine passive, appliance based probes. IP Engines are located at key points across the network and are sized based on the number of concurrent streams to monitor. A single IP Engine based on a micro appliance can manage 5-10 simultaneous streams, whereas a server based IP Engine can manage 10,000 simultaneous streams if required. The Experience Server is typically situated in the Network Operations Centre (NOC). It is fully configurable, via a built-in web-based GUI, and provides an instant overview of all calls across subnets, key locations or business units and end-points. It can be used to drill-down into the performance data for a group, end-point, call, or call segment. The GUI’s provided are used to configure the entire system, provide support for the Level 1 Service Desk, the Level 2/3 support organisation, and the IT business and operations functions.
Key Experience Manager Functions and Components:
Monitoring, Alerting, Troubleshooting and Reporting Function
Replacing the common 'ad hoc' trial and error approach to service and performance management for voice and video with efficient and proactive "monitor-alert-diagnose-report" processes is an essential element of the Experience Manager value proposition. These are the drivers behind Experience Managers benefits in improving user experience management, IT cost savings, and IT operational efficiencies.
Experience Server
Experience Server is the central server which aggregates and analyses the call data from the IP Engines and end points. Experience Server is architected to allow service providers or enterprises to run single or multiple separate 'domains' or multi-tenant units (MTU's) with each domain operating stand alone or reporting upward to the higher level server. This allows a single instance of Experience Server to be implemented supporting multiple separate enterprise customers or domains, keeping the operating data separate and secure, with controlled access to the data by authorised users. Experience Server runs on a Linux or Windows based server and is typically located in a central NOC.Experience Server aggregates call quality details for all calls being monitored to allow the pin pointing of the source of any call quality degradation e.g. user experience issues caused by IP transmission problems, faulty microphones, or headsets, or the detection of environmental issues in call centres for example. Additionally problems generated by WAN circuits or providers can be pinpointed by monitoring the quality of the streams entering and leaving the affected circuit.
Experience Server also provides centralised configuration management, hosts the web based user interfaces, the primary data base, and provides the interface to the OSS historic calls database.
IP Engine
IP Engines are passive, appliance based measurement probes that are located at commercial and technological demarcation points (connectivity between Enterprise and Service Provider for example, connectivity to PSTN gateway, SIP trunk access etc) and employ Psytechnics' QoE measurement software to do the "heavy-lifting" assessment of the live voice and video streams. By assessing a copy of the RTP streams, the probes are not in the network path and do not introduce latency or failure points) they also are unable to record or interpret any conversation or video). For all streams the IP Engines assess any impact to the user experience that the IP transport may be introducing, and the payload assessment for voice and video enables the impact to the user experience at the application level to be assessed. IP Engines are connected to the network via a switch span port or network tap. IP Engines are sized based on the number of concurrent streams that need to be assessed, and vary in size from a small appliance based micro PC for 5-10 concurrent streams, through to large server based appliances for 10,000 or so concurrent streams.
End Point Data Collection Engine
End-point measurements: Psytechnics QoE metrics can be embedded into end-points including IP-phones, wireless devices, routers and soft-clients, end point data can also be collected from Microsoft OCS 2007 QoE Monitoring Server and other vendor end point aggregators (note however that the accuracy and usefulness of this end point data varies tremendously across vendors). The end-point data collection manager (based on an IP Engine) is used to collect end-point measurement data and pass it to Experience server for aggregation into the IP Engine mid-point sourced data.
Service Desk Manager
Service desk manager extends the capabilities of Experience Manager to the 1st line Service/Help desk, enabling support staff to correctly identify problems and send detailed trouble-tickets to the correct resolver group.Service Desk Manager:
| • | Proactively generates health reports for IP Phones and Gateways |
| • | Provides call quality information for requested Extension, User ID or IP address range |
| • | Displays supplemental information for selected calls including on-demand health reports for IP endpoints and a network view of the call showing the location of IP problems |
| • | Exports relevant information in plain text format so it can be easily added to trouble-tickets |
Level 2/3 Diagnostics
Experience Manager's advanced diagnostics support enables Level 2/3 support staff to rapidly (within 4 or 5 clicks) diagnose call quality problems due to its advanced call quality data aggregation, analytics and presentation.
Real-time Dashboard
The real-time dashboard provides an at-a-glance summary for communications performance across all locations and business functions. Key factors for IP-network health and application performance (as they directly impact voice and video quality) are shown including for multiple Experience Manager systems (as is the case for hosted and managed service providers).
Report Generator
Experience Manager has an extensive report generator with standard and customizable reports available for generating trend, proactive support, SLA compliance, device performance specific and diagnostics reports. Report information is used for operations performance and compliance monitoring, long term trend tracking and profiling of individual sites or devices.
OSS Historic Calls Database
The OSS database is for longer term storage of call performance for more advanced troubleshooting, historical and trend analysis and reporting of voice and video call performance. This database is synchronised with the real-time Experience Server database and can be configured to hold records for a default time period of 1 year, the ultimate limit is defined by the size of the IP communications deployment and the disk space available on the chosen server.
Integration Interface
Experience Manager has a sophisticated API (OSS integration interface) to allow for integration of diagnostic and root cause alerts to external Fault Management systems such as CA eHealth, LiveHealth and Spectrum, IBM Tivoli Netcool, HP Management Suite, and for the exporting of specific diagnostic information to external Performance Management Systems such as CA's eHealth for example.For more information read the Experience Manager datasheet.