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MSO Network Operation

Centre
Graeme Spice

Requirements
Round the clock surveillance and support for a
complex network supporting Voice, Broadcast
Media and Broadband services
Diversity in vendors and equipment
Diversity in operational support systems
Multiple support parties

This Diversity creates multiple streams of data

from the network and systems as well as your
customers.
Poorly designed NOCs require a lot of people
looking at a lot of screens - this is to be avoided.

Requirements cont.
Operations Center should have full management
capabilities for all technologies cant be managed if it
cant be seen.

Fault detection (Reactive monitoring including video surveillance)

Fault resolution (troubleshooting)
Performance & Capacity data (Pro-active monitoring)
Network & MSP Workforce Orchestration
Change and Configuration Management of the Network Change
Governance.
SLA measurement and reporting

One common management that environment that can:

Monitor MSO-wide network status and identify alarms using a single
network map
Track all outages for network performance reporting and to identify
common problems across networks

Management Vision
Top Down Service Approach TV, Broadband &
Telephony Services (Including supporting IT estate).
Simplified single pane view of the network, systems
and services minimizes screen real estate
requirements
Common tools across as many technologies as possible
making cross training easier for first line support
Focus on Service Up time
Good record keeping from day 1 current state and
previous states, start as we mean to go on
Providing a Quality NOC requires good People, good
Processes and good Tools.

NOC functions

24x7 NOC Team

NOC First Line engineers (Generic skill sets)

NOC Support Engineers (Specialised in an area)
3x NOC Shift Team Lead (first point of escalation night or day) to provide overlapping shift handover coverage

Business Hours and Call out team

Senior NOC Support Engineers (Expert level in a technology or service)

NOC Manager (Second point of escalation and ultimately the owner of all NOC functions
Change & Configuration Manager Responsible for tracking changes to configurations and inventory in the
network.
Service Level Manager benchmarking, measuring and reporting on performance of the process as well as the
network and services.

In a start up phase some of these roles can be combined

NOC Functions

Acts as Central Contact for all outages planned or unplanned Change and Configuration Management/Incident
and Problem Management
Follows customized support processes Incident and Problem Management processes
Detects & records events - surveillance
Investigates & prioritizes incidents Incident Management
Notifies & consults with customers/partners
Escalates & resolves incidents
Manages life cycle of trouble records Jeopardy Management/SLA Management
Mediates issues with vendors and carrier
Manages Changes to the network Change Management
Manages Configuration changes to the network Configuration Management

Suggested Organisation

First Line
Support
Senior
support

NOC Systems

NOC Systems

There are many software vendors offering frameworks of tools for

Management of Networks.
There is a grey area around definition of OSS this should be clearly
defined at the outset as well as ownership and accountability. The NOC
toolset is network facing OSS, there is data used for Mediation, Billing and
Activation which can be used to manage the network and services. This
being the case its important a common SOA architecture is used to
enable the simple exchange of open format data via SOAP and Web
Services and other simple open interfaces.
Tools currently under consideration for NOC deployment
Vendor EMS/NMS platforms
Nagios
Cacti

There are several other lower cost providers of tools in this space that
should be looked at, all provide a decent but not class leading level of
functionality.
Free or open source toolsets require less Capital investment but more
Opex investment in support and customisation and dont necessarily
scale for a full Service provider model

Data Types

SNMP traps
SNMP Polled OID data
Syslog events
IPDR performance data
TR069 Device data
Non SNMP Alarm data
Northbound EMS/NMS Feeds
Inventory Model
Trouble Ticket Data

There is a need for a Canonical Data Model for information sharing between
all parts of the business

Key strategic tool

requirements
Flexibility: Ease of change, ability to intercept
new requirements in the future (i.e. New
technology/Vendor/Service)
Scalability: Can grow or be grown in advance of
network growth or has a known limit which can
be planned for.
Cost containment non-linear cost vs Network
growth for future
Lean architecture: Minimise number of tools,
systems and suppliers to minimise support and
training costs.
Simplicity: Ease of use/support.

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