Technology Overview

Vantify Experience Centre has four main parts.

Complex Event Processing Engine – This module provides Complex Event Processing (CEP) capabilities. It is able to efficiently process many thousands of events per second and apply a set of CEP operations such as filtering, aggregation and enrichment to serve the overlying Customer and Service Experience modules. Vantify provides a number of models for integration with event sources including open APIs and a library of adaptors for common middleware such as TIBCOTM, .NETTM and JAVATM. Where native events are not available, other approaches including SNMP and log-file parsing are supported.
Vantify provides a set of templates allowing users to very easily define the event trigger conditions that should invoke some form of notification or alarm on the dashboard or via external interface.

Figure 1

A number of connectors are shown in Figure 1 enabling integration with CRM, Trouble Ticketing and Analytics / Database systems, in addition to the ‘Trigger’ interface. These connectors allow records to be created or updated in external systems in response to detection of configurable trigger conditions. For example, a user who attempts an IVR top-up of their prepaid account 3 times in 10 minutes could lead to an incident record being automatically created in their CRM account history. This enables very proactive management, for example the notification could be used to prompt a call to the user or possibly a bonus top-up. The ‘Trigger’ adaptor supports control rather than data connections to external systems. For example, a load-balancer could be directed to re-route traffic to a standby system in the event that failure or reduced performance of the primary system is detected.

Customer Experience Management(CEM) – CEM provides the ability to monitor, alarm and analyse service delivery or business activities from the perspective of an individual or group of customers. For example, a CEP template may be defined to generate a notification if an end-to-end provisioning operation exceeds a certain target time for a configurable number of customers. When this event occurs, CEM will present provisioning performance data associated with the MSISDNs that are outside the required range. The Vantify user may then visually ‘drill-down’ to inspect events and data associated with the underling operations (e.g. provision HLR, provision Voice Mail ….) to determine where the operation failed or was delayed. It is this use of CEP that enables business activities to be investigated at any level of detail.

Service Experience Management(SEM) – SEM provides the ability to monitor, alarm and analyse service delivery or business activity from the perspective of the service provider or business activity owner. Data presentation tends to be based on aggregated performance, for example presentation of average ‘end-to-end’ and ‘per-system’ provisioning time over a 24 hour period. As with CEM, templates allow the user to rapidly define performance related triggers that will be signalled visually via the dashboard and optionally via external connectors as described below.

Dashboard – A real-time visual display presenting the CEM and/or SEM data for the monitored business activities and services. As mentioned earlier, Vantify allows the user to drill-down to an arbitrary depth to investigate the performance of IT or network elements underlying the high level business activity or service.