AMDOCS OSS

RELEASE 8.1

Service Assurance Adapter 8.1.0

Product Description
Document Information

Release: 8.1
Publication Date: 31 December 2009
Catalog Number:
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Created: 12/22/2009 1:51:00 PM
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Last Edited: 11/05/2010 9:30:37 AM
File Name: Service Assurance Adapter 8.1.0 Product Description.docx
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Table of Contents

1 Introduction to Service Assurance Adapter .................................................................... 1

Key features and benefits .................................................................................................................... 1
Services to support root cause analysis ................................................................................................... 1
Supporting features .................................................................................................................................. 2
Integrated Product Suite ...................................................................................................................... 3

2 Product Features .............................................................................................................. 5

Support for root cause analysis ........................................................................................................... 5
Support for impact analysis .................................................................................................................. 6
Filtering ................................................................................................................................................ 7
Physical details for site engineering work orders................................................................................. 7
Translation ........................................................................................................................................... 7
Service oriented architecture ............................................................................................................... 7
Continued support for the HTTP gateway ........................................................................................... 9

3 User Interface Functions ................................................................................................ 11

4 Licensing Information..................................................................................................... 13

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1 Introduction to Service Assurance
Adapter
The Amdocs Service Assurance Adapter enables integration of the Amdocs OSS with
Service Assurance (or Fault Management) applications. The integration supports the
Service Assurance process by providing the Service Assurance application with
detailed information relating to network faults. This includes details of the multi-
layer, multi-technology physical and logical inventory affected by faults. It also
includes the details of customer services affected by faults. The information enables
more effective fault analysis and prioritization.
The adapter offers powerful filtering and translation tools, enabling a developer to
customize the information exchanged between Amdocs OSS and the Service
Assurance application.
The product includes operations that support the retrieval of inventory information
related to faults. These provide a powerful interface to support fault diagnosis and
prioritization, at an appropriate level of abstraction. The operations enable a
functionally rich, loosely coupled integration.
The adapter is implemented on Amdocs’ Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which
facilitates flexible deployment, integration and customization in an existing OSS
architecture.

Key features and benefits

The Service Assurance Adapter provides powerful capabilities that, together, allow
operators to benefit from an integrated solution in support of automated operations.

Services to support root cause analysis

Service Assurance applications can use the information returned by the following
services for more rapid and accurate fault diagnosis and root cause analysis:

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Service Assurance Adapter 8.1.0 Product Description

Underlying circuit request

This provides information on the circuits on which an identified service is directly or
indirectly dependent.
Underlying connection request
This provides information on the circuits, topologies, links and cables on which an
identified circuit is directly or indirectly dependent.
Services to support impact analysis
Service Assurance applications can use this information returned in the following
services to enable prioritization of network faults, for example, ensuring that faults
related to customers with higher service level agreements are prioritized:
Traffic request
This provides information on the circuits that would be affected, directly or indirectly,
given the failure of a device, card or port in the network.
Service request
This provides information on the services affected, directly or indirectly, by the
failure of an identified network device, card, port, application or logical environment
in the network.
Overlying circuit and service request
This provides information on the overlying circuits and corresponding services
affected, directly or indirectly, by the failure of an identified circuit, link or cable in
the network.
Terminating circuit and service request
This provides information on all the circuits that terminate on the specified location
(or any locations in its location hierarchy) and all the services that are dependent on
those circuits.

Supporting features
Filtering of results by object type
This enables developers to provide highly focused diagnosis and prioritization
information, on the basis of one or more types of service or network technology.
Translation
This provides translation between the different object identifiers and statuses used in
Amdocs OSS and the external Service Assurance application.
Location information
Location information is returned with each end point for all queries returning circuits,
links and cables to support site engineering work orders without the need for extra
queries.
SOA enabled services
The new version of the Service Assurance Adapter is implemented using Amdocs’
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) foundation. This allows the supported services
to be delivered over a variety of supported transport technologies to facilitate
integration into an existing OSS architecture.

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 Chapter 1. Introduction to Service Assurance Adapter

Easily customizable
The System Integrator can add customized queries to the Service Assurance Adapter
which means that other custom adapters will not be required.

Integrated Product Suite

The Service Assurance Adapter is a productized adapter for Amdocs OSS 8.0 (Figure
1). Amdocs Resource Manager is a pre-requisite license in order to use the adapter.

Figure 1 - Amdocs OSS 8.0

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2 Product Features
Support for root cause analysis
When a network fault occurs, alarms are raised by affected network equipment. A
single network fault may trigger alarms from equipment in many locations, across
many technologies. Should a fault occur in equipment (e.g. a card in an ATM
switch), all services using the equipment directly or indirectly may be affected, and
equipment in supported networks may raise alarms (e.g. a PE router using capacity
through the faulty ATM switch). Service Assurance applications monitor the network
and present alarm information to users. Based on the alarms raised across the
network, the users must determine the cause (or causes) of the alarms. Service
Assurance applications often use sophisticated tools to determine the root cause of a
fault from a disparate alarm stream. Corrective action is taken on the basis of this
cause analysis.
Amdocs OSS stores the rich relationships between network equipment, its
connectivity and, importantly, the technology layers in the network. An IP network,
for example, may be supported by an ATM backbone, which itself is served by an
SDH/SONET network using a DWDM core. These relationships are maintained
within Resource Manager. Service Assurance applications, specializing in network
monitoring and alarm analysis can leverage this information to support the root cause
analysis process.
Using the Service Assurance Adapter, Service Assurance applications can query
Amdocs OSS to determine the equipment affected, directly or indirectly, should a
network fault occur. This valuable data can be used in conjunction with alarm
information to support effective, efficient and accurate root cause analysis.
Service Assurance Adapter provides enhanced support for root cause analysis
providing the following services:
Underlying circuit request
The Service Assurance Adapter supports requests for the underlying circuits of an
identified service which has been affected by a fault. The connections affected at

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Service Assurance Adapter 8.1.0 Product Description

any layer of the network are returned, including details of the circuit’s status and end
points.
Underlying connection request
The Service Assurance Adapter supports requests for the underlying circuits,
topologies, links and cables on which an identified circuit which has been affected by
a fault is directly or indirectly dependent. The connections affected at any layer of
the network are returned, including details of the connection’s status and end points.

Support for impact analysis

Faults occurring in the network may cause loss or degradation of service to a network
operator’s customers. Presented with one or more faults in the network (determined
through cause analysis), it is vital for an operator to rapidly assess the consequence of
these faults and their relative priority. In order to carry out this process effectively,
the Service Assurance user should know which customers are affected by the
identified faults.
In addition to rich multi-layer relationship information held within Amdocs Resource
Manager, the relationship between the services provisioned in the network and the
resources allocated to them is recorded. If a faulty network component is identified,
the Service Assurance Adapter can provide all services directly or indirectly affected
by the fault. Service Assurance applications can leverage this information to enable
effective consequence analysis (which services are affected by which faults) and
prioritize fault fixing in the network.
Service Assurance Adapter provides enhanced support for impact analysis providing
the following services:
Traffic request
The Service Assurance Adapter supports requests for logical connections affected by
a fault in an identified network device, card or port. The connections affected at any
layer of the network are returned, including details of the circuit’s status and end
points.
Service request
The Service Assurance Adapter supports requests for services affected by a fault in an
identified network device, card, port, application or logical environment. The
services affected at any layer of the network are returned, including details of the type
and status of the service, the customer of the service and any network protection
provided for the service.
Overlying circuit and service request
The Service Assurance Adapter supports requests for the overlying circuits and
corresponding services affected, directly or indirectly, by the failure of an identified
circuit, link or cable in the network. The circuits and services affected at any layer of
the network are returned, including details of the type and status of the circuits and
corresponding services, the end points of the circuits, the customer of the services and
any network protection provided for the service.
Terminating service and circuit request
The Service Assurance Adapter supports requests for the circuits that terminate on the
specified location (or any locations in its location hierarchy) and all the services that
are dependent on those circuits. The circuits and services at any layer of the network
are returned, including details of the type and status of the circuits and corresponding

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 Chapter 2. Product Features

services, the end points of the circuits, the customer of the services and any network
protection provided for the service.

Filtering
The Service Assurance Adapter has a core filtering capability. For any request, the
results returned can be filtered by the type of circuit, service, topology, link or cable.
This enables the Service Assurance application to focus a request for fault impact
data within a single technology domain or service offering.

Physical details for site engineering work orders

Location information is returned as part of the end point information of all queries
returning circuits, links and cables.
Therefore, no additional queries will be required to return location details.

Translation
The Service Assurance Adapter receives requests for traffic or service information,
and returns the details of the affected circuits and services. In order for the Amdocs
OSS and Service Assurance applications to identify network components, a means of
referencing objects common to both systems (such as ports, cards and devices) is
required.
Converter classes provide the capability to convert Resource Manager object IDs or
statuses to equivalent external IDs or statuses and vice versa.
The following converters are provided with the product:

Conversion of external object IDs to Resource Manager IDs.

Conversion of Resource Manager IDs to external object IDs.

Conversion of Resource Manager provision statuses to equivalent external
statuses.

Service oriented architecture

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) foundation on which version 2.0 of the
Service Assurance Adapter is developed provides extensive flexibility in how
services are deployed and customized.

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Service Assurance Adapter 8.1.0 Product Description

Figure 2 - Service Assurance Adapter architecture

Amdocs’ SOA foundation provides a generic framework for publishing encapsulated
inventory business logic as a service. It uses Service Component Architecture (SCA)
technology to publish inventory business logic as a defined service on one of a
configurable set of transport technologies.
A request is made by the fault management system to one of the published services
on its configured transport. The Service Component Architecture receives the request
and invokes the underlying service provider, a Cramer Object Model (COM) method.
The results of the COM method are then translated by the SOA framework into value
objects and the results are returned over the configured transport.

Note: The Cramer Object Model (COM) is a specialized read-only interface to

the Amdocs Resource Manager inventory. It provides both low-level and high-
value inventory query capabilities.
Amdocs’ SOA foundation is described in more detail in SOA Foundation Product
Description.
Configurable transport
The Service Assurance Adapter supports multiple underlying transport mechanisms
through SCA making it easy to deploy the adapter into an existing OSS architecture.
Service components can be configured to use any of the transport mechanisms
supported by the SCA implementation.
Extensibility
The Service Assurance Adapter can be customized to provide additional queries and
services using the underlying Service Component Architecture.
Where the Cramer Object Model (COM) already exposes a capability, e.g. through
object queries and relationship navigation or through high-value methods, the
capability can be exposed as a SOA service through the creation of a new service
component.
New COM methods developed by an integrator can be exposed in a similar way.

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 Chapter 2. Product Features

Deployment and integration

The Service Assurance Adapter provides a rich and extensible capability that is
designed to enable an integrator to take the product and perform a rapid integration to
any suitable Service Assurance platform.
The ‘out of the box’ adapter configuration will usually require a level of
customization to meet the requirements of a specific customer environment.
Customization kit
A customization kit is provided with the Service Assurance Adapter that supports
customization activities.

Continued support for the HTTP gateway

The Service Assurance Adapter will continue to support the HTTP gateway as a
means of providing the following services which were available in Service Assurance
Adapter 1.7:

Traffic request

Service request.

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3 User Interface Functions
The Service Assurance Adapter does not impact Cramer user interface functions as it
is completely driven via the SOA framework and API.

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4 Licensing Information
Product Name Service Assurance Adapter
Product Code IN8-CN-0720
Product pre-requisites IN8-SV-0100-00 Amdocs Resource Manager
Platform pre-requisites Amdocs OSS 8.1 Platform Requirements
Other pre-requisites This product requires the corresponding module, or a
custom integration, installed on the Service Assurance
platform. This component is not licensed by Amdocs.
Licensing The product is licensed on a deployed instance basis.
Note: One license is required for each Service Assurance
instance that is connected to a Amdocs OSS server
instance. No additional Amdocs OSS System Connection
products are required for deploying this adapter.
This adapter grants the right to read Amdocs Resource
Manager data through the defined interface.
Delivery List
Right to use license

Software

Documentation:
 Installation guide
 Release notes
 Configuration Task Guide
 Configuration Reference Guide

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Document Release Information
Edited Doc
Release Editor Comments Sent to Site Approved By
Date Version
7.5 P. McHugh 30/09/09 N/A 1.0
8.0 P. Eksteen 18/12/09 N/A 1.1
8.1 P. Eksteen 05/11/20 N/A 1.2

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