PDF of this tutorialThe new business model for managing services places the customer at the center of the provisioning and service assurance processes. It shifts the focus away from managing only network elements to correlating network events with specific customers and services. The customer becomes the core of the network model.
To achieve this, service providers need to build a knowledge base that is available to all service management applications that interact with the network. That knowledge base must be populated with customer-related information and specific service instance information. Through this new knowledge base, direct associations can be made among service instances, customers receiving the services, and status of network elements carrying those services. This leads to customer-awareness, permitting the instant correlation of any event, device, or service with a specific customer. In addition, for a system to make full use of this new customer-awareness, the system should have the tightest integration possible between the primary areas of service management—provisioning, discovery, fault management, and performance monitoring. This integration can help ensure that network, customer, and service data is gathered, utilized, and presented in a consistent way, increasing the usefulness and effectiveness of the overall system.
Figure 2. Customer-Aware System
This model makes customer-aware end-to-end service management possible. For example, suppose a customer contracts for transparent local-area network (TLAN) connectivity (such as Layer-2 VPN) between New York and Chicago.
The network service provider provisions the service, and the customer-aware system automatically populates the fault management and performance-monitoring database with the details on the contract’s parameters. In the knowledge base, the information about the customer and this service is directly linked to the network resources configured to carry it. If a switch fails along the route of the TLAN, the fault management system flags the fault and correlates it with the service and the customer. The service provider can call the customer with a status report before the customer is even aware there is a problem.
