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Network Fault Management

The Zen Fault Management solution delivers improved MTTR through alarm reduction, root cause analysis and network performance correlation.

Introducing Zen Network Fault Management

Industry Needs

In today’s competitive landscape, ensuring continual availability of the telecommunications network is essential. As infrastructure has grown, so too has the number of alarms generated from mobile and fixed line networks. To be successful in maintaining and optimising these networks, Service Providers have turned to a new generation of network fault management solutions.

Fault management software that can simply detect and report on fault alarms is no longer sufficient. Customers need new solutions that can deliver improved MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) through advanced functionality including alarm reduction, alarm analytics, automatic RCA (Root Cause Analysis), the ability to correlate faults directly with network performance metrics, and open or closed loop automation.

The Zen Fault Management Solution

The Zen FM (Fault Management) application provides the functionality and independence to detect, report, automate, correlate and rectify network faults from many sources, all within one window.

SysMech Zen Vision Diagram

Designed to be highly flexible, Zen FM can access data from a number of different sources; directly from network elements, from legacy fault management systems, or from a centralised data lake.

Network fault data is rapidly displayed in the alarm handling window, from which network engineers can view, acknowledge and action fault alarms in real-time. From the same window, network engineers can also create their own alarm reduction rules to eliminate low level, non-critical alarms.

The Zen Fault Management module also enables network engineers to analyse historical alarms to identify patterns of behaviour and create complex root cause analysis scenarios. This allows symptomatic alarms to be hidden and replaced with root cause alarms, significantly reducing administration and investigation times. By correlating this fault information with network performance metrics and customer data, workloads can be prioritised based on actual performance and customer impact.

Zen can also be configured to monitor for specific alarms or root causes in order to alert northbound platforms, initiate trouble ticket creation or instigate automated diagnostic or remedial actions.

Zen FM is provided as part of the Zen Operational Intelligence Platform, or available as a stand-alone solution.

CORBA SOAP Java TCP/IP
OSS/J SNMP V1, V2c, V3 API Syslog
3GPP ITO-T IETF W3C
ISO MTOSI TM Forum OMG
Zen FM Collection Standards, Mechanisms, and Protocol Support

Key Features & Benefits

Decrease MTTR with advanced Root Cause Analysis

With Zen Fault Management software, Customers will see a significant reduction in MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Resolution) by eliminating unnecessary alarms and prioritising high impact faults. Network engineers can eliminate low level alarms appearing in the alarm handling window by creating simple alarm reduction rules. They can also use Zen’s powerful Root Cause Analysis engine, which enables symtomatic alarms to be hidden and replaced with root cause alarms.

Improve QoE by prioritising customer impacting faults

CSP’s can correlate network faults with network performance metrics such as Accessibility, Retainability, Mobility, Utilisation and Availability to easily identify the faults which have the biggest impact on subscribers. Automatic alerts can also be enabled for faults affecting VIPs or special events, ensuring the faults are rectified as a priority, and maintain a favourable QoE (Quality of Experience).

Align to strategic OSS Transformation objectives with a flexible implementation

Zen Fault Management software is vendor agnostic and can access data from almost any source. This means the solution can be implemented as a stand-alone solution, on top of a strategic data lake, or as part of a wider Zen Operational Intelligence platform to enable true OSS transformation.

Truly Customisable event handling

Zen builds on decades of experience in mediating data for traditional fault management platforms such as TeMIP, Smarts, NNM and Netcool. Our proven and enhanced technology is ready to flexibly transform events from anywhere within your business, tailoring them to your operational needs. We may even be able to import and transform configuration exports from your existing platforms to enable the upgrade to Zen more rapidly.

Zen-FM Event to Alarm

 

Use Cases


Automated Alarm Reduction

Network engineers are faced with an abundance of network fault alarms, and this is set to increase as the network expands and new technologies are introduced. Zen’s automated alarm reduction enables network engineers to prioritize their workload and deduce the cause of an alarm more rapidly. The solution automatically reduces low level alarms appearing in the alarm handling window, instead, just showing a primary major alarm to which, the low-level alarms are associated.

    Node Failure Root Cause Analysys

    A significant amount of resource is often spent on investigating the root cause of a network fault alarm. This can involve multiple engineer call-outs before the issue is remedied. Zen’s root cause analysis functionality enables network engineers to build custom root cause scenarios which alert to the equipment/links responsible for the fault(s). In this example, if a GSM node fails, it cannot raise an alarm, however multiple related alarms are raised by the switches using it. Zen identifies the GSM node as the root cause if a defined number of topological switch alarms are generated within a set time.