Alcatel-lucent 5670RAM DATA SHEET, 5670 RAM RELEASE 3 Manual

Alcatel-Lucent 5670 RAM

R E P O R T I N G A N D A N A L Y S I S M A N A G E R | R E L E A S E 3 . 0

Application traffic flow intelligence for business VPN sites and residential subscribers

The Alcatel-Lucent 5670 Reporting and Analysis Manager (RAM) provides accurate, timely application-level intelligence for service providers, enterprise business and operational planning, as well as insight into improving application performance and QoS optimization by collecting, warehousing, aggregating and analyzing application performance and volumetric data for application traffic flows over the IP/MPLS network. It is an integral part of the Alcatel-Lucent management portfolio for application-assured business VPNs and residential triple play managed online services. With the 5670 RAM, service providers gain the ability to:

•Generate a wide range of report types out-of-the-box using pre-defined templates

•Create customized reports using the self-service report authoring capability

•Visualize application usage trends and TCP performance across service segments or through specific points in the network

•Deliver executive-level Application Performance Index (APDEX)

score dashboard views on overall user satisfaction and health of applications used over the network

•Automatically distribute reports in a variety of formats by e-mail or to external systems for further processing

•Receive e-mail notifications when pre-set thresholds are exceeded so that they can take immediate action

•Gain visibility into how to best refine subscriber and VPN site Application Assurance (AA)-related QoS policies

Application assurance management architecture

The Alcatel-Lucent 5670 RAM generates volumetric AA traffic flow reports based on billing-grade application accounting data that

it receives from the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM). The 5620 SAM is leveraged to collect the application intelligence from Alcatel-Lucent 7750 Service Routers (SRs) and Alcatel-Lucent 7450 Ethernet Service Switches (ESSs) equipped with Multi Service-Integrated Service Adapters (MS-ISAs). The 5620 SAM also provides network management, including definition and distribution of network-wide AA measurement policies, for the MS-ISAs.

Additionally, the 5670 RAM samples and reports on application-level TCP performance, such as application latency, jitter and packet loss, by leveraging its own highly scalable, load-distributed collection and processing system for raw AA cflowd traffic data generated by the MS-ISA.

The Alcatel-Lucent 5670 RAM functionality is provided by three components:

•The 5670 RAM Data Collection and Processing (DCP) systems, which load-balance the collection, processing and aggregation of raw

sampled AA cflowd data and enable scaling with growing point-to-point application-level TCP performance monitoring demands

•The 5670 RAM Server, which aggregates AA accounting data from the 5620 SAM and warehouses the large volumes of aggregated historical AA statistics and raw data provided by the 5620 SAM, as well as the aggregated TCP flow statistics from the 5670 RAM DCP systems

•The 5670 RAM Reporter, which provides a web portal that allows both pre-defined and customized reports to be easily created and distributed to a wide audience or to external systems. The 5670 RAM Reporter also proactively monitors statistics for pre-set threshold crossing conditions, notifying

operators when reports are available so that they can take immediate action when required

Alcatel-Lucent custom-developed service portals can further streamline operations within the service provider organization. These portals are integrated with

the 5620 SAM and include 5670 RAM Reporter web reports. They can also be used to provide information directly to enterprise customers.

The 5670 RAM can also be used in conjunction with the Alcatel-Lucent 5750 Subscriber Services Controller (SSC) or Alcatel-Lucent 5780 Dynamic Services Controller (DSC) to enable AA policy management. For example, operators can use 5670 RAM reports to determine how to use QoS traffic

re-marking and policy shaping in order to better control traffic and provide a higher quality customer experience for high-revenue subscriber applications or for mission-critical enterprise

WAN applications.

See Figure 1 for an illustration of how the 5670 RAM fits within the Alcatel-Lucent application assurance management architecture.

Figure 1. How the 5670 RAM fits within the Alcatel-Lucent application assurance management architecture

5670 RAM

Presentation

OSS connected

Service portal

5670 RAM Reporter

Policy control

and

partner applications

integration

• Performance

• Customized

• Report generation

and SLA

operator and

• Trend analysis

management

customer

• Threshold crossing alerts

• OSS integration

web portals

• Web content publishing

5750 SSC / 5780 DSC

Data

• AA statistics aggregation

aggregation

and warehousing

and

• Data management

warehousing

• OSS interface

5670 RAM Server

Data

• TCP performance sample

• MS-ISA configuration

collection

data collection

• Application definition

• Collection load-balancing

• Raw AA accounting

• Data processing

5670 RAM DCP

5620 SAM Statistics collection

Enterprise

Enterprise

headquarters

branch offices

VPN site #1

Data center

VPN site #2

video office

VPN site #3

MS-ISA

7750 SR

Metro

MS-ISA

IP/MPLS

MS-ISA

aggregation

backbone

	7750 SR	7750 SR
	MS-ISA	MS-ISA
Access	BSR/BNG	BSR/BNG	Access
	7450 ESS	7450 ESS
node	BSA	BSA	node

Residential triple play

2 Alcatel-Lucent 5670 RAM | Release 3.0 | Data Sheet

Key features

Distributed architecture

The Alcatel-Lucent 5670 RAM supports a distributed architecture for secure data warehousing and remote archival and restoration of very high volumes of raw and aggregated statistics. It offers high performance for efficient, long-term analysis and optimal reporting visualization of current patterns and historical trends.

With data aggregation and reporting distributed across separate systems, service providers benefit from increased scalability and reliability to help them address the needs of the largest business VPN and triple play architectures. They gain maximum performance in aggregating and warehousing millions of raw statistics in short intervals. For example, the 5670 RAM Server aggregates raw statistics into hourly aggregates, then it uses the hourly data to compute daily aggregates, which are used to create weekly aggregates.

Server scalability and reliability Data aggregation and reporting distributed across separate systems:

•5670 RAM DCP systems

¬Collects samples of raw cflowd application-level performance data

¬Processes and aggregates cflowd data into TCP performance statistics for reporting

•5670 RAM Server

¬Aggregates raw interval (5/10/15 minutes, for example) accounting statistics data from the 5620 SAM into hourly, daily and weekly aggregates

•5670 RAM Reporter

¬Based on meta-data model that maps to the RAM Server statistics database scheme

¬Provides a set of pre-defined reports stored in the 5670 RAM Server database

Northbound interfaces and OSS integration

The Alcatel-Lucent 5670 RAM Server allows for integration with third-party OSS billing, performance, and SLA management and policy control applications through its OSS interface. For example, the billing-grade accounting data from the 5670 RAM Server can be integrated with thirdparty billing systems to allow application-aware subscriber billing, including tiered-pricing models, “zero-rated” metering, usage-based service packages, etc. As another example, policy control applications can be integrated to apply policies that limit social-applications over the

business WAN during core-business hours, and to apply other customized application-aware policy configurations specific for each enterprise VPN customer.

The 5670 RAM Reporter provides Web Services Remote Portlet (WSRP) Release 1.0 support so that WSRP portlets can be embedded in thirdparty web portals and applications. In addition, third-party WSRP Release 1.0 portlets can be embedded in the 5670 RAM web portal.

Reporting

The 5670 RAM Reporter provides a wide variety of pre-defined report types, customizable report capabilities and web portal features — all of which can be used for business or operational purposes. For example, accounting reporting can be used for utilization volume trend analysis, performance reporting for operational audits on customer experience, and TCP flow utilization reporting on “routes of interest” for network optimization and capacity planning.

Table 1 summarizes the report types available from the 5670 RAM Reporter.

Table 1. 5670 RAM Reporter report types and descriptions

REPORT TYPE	DESCRIPTIONS
VPN site or subscriber analysis	• VPN site or subscriber trends and usage in a specified time span
	• Top applications or residential users
Application analysis	• Application trends and usage in a specified time span
	• Top applications, application groups, protocols
Application distribution	• Application distribution in an application group
TCP flow analysis	• 5670 RAM DCP cflowd sampled point-to-point TCP flow statistics
	¬ View per application utilization and performance on “routes of interest”
	(Source-to-Destination) for insight into optimization and capacity planning
	• Performance metrics include:
	¬ Application level client, server and network trip delay
	¬ Application packet and byte loss ratios
	¬ Application delay variation (jitter)
APDEX score (an ITIL key performance metric)	• “Stop light” style view into operational health of applications
	¬ Includes application performance, bandwidth usage, and other key indicators
	• Executive level 5670 RAM dashboard APDEX score views
	¬ Includes drill-down reports with threshold cross alerts (TCAs)

Alcatel-Lucent 5670 RAM | Release 3.0 | Data Sheet

3