Staying connected

This Nordic telecom operator relies on its network operations center (NOC) team to monitor the company’s technical infrastructure, including tens of thousands of base stations. Each station broadcasts quite a few mobile cells and is equipped with physical systems such as rectifiers, routers, switches, power units and more.

The Network Operations Center Manager (NOC Manager) comments, “Our network is part of the region’s critical infrastructure. It is essential that we can identify and resolve issues speedily and cost-effectively to deliver a trustworthy, high-performance network.”

The Operations Systems Support Solution Architect (OSS Architect) adds, “With the rapid expansion of 5G and IoT, we see a huge inflow of alarms every day. We have several hundred thousand monitored devices, any of which could send an alarm to the NOC. Our pre-existing monitoring solution displayed data on multiple screens, with different alerts for different systems, and offered no way to correlate or check dependencies. For example, if a base station went down, we would select one alarm as the master ticket item and ignore the others until we had rectified the failure; a method that risked missing the root cause.”

The already-stretched NOC team looked for ways to handle growing volumes effectively and efficiently, to ensure the best possible network performance.

To resolve the immediate technical challenges and create an enabling path for future business strategies, the Nordic telecom operator engaged with Compose IT and IBM to implement Compose Operation Platform, built on IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps.

Compose Operation Platform is a complete turnkey solution designed to deliver unified visibility into performance data and dependencies for telcos, helping improve incident management and remediation. The underlying IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps routes information from existing systems and alarm triggers directly to the platform, which collects, collates and manages information in a single presentation layer.

The OSS Architect comments, “We were impressed with Compose IT’s professionalism and expertise as they worked on resolving issues with our legacy solution under a very tight deadline.”

Alarms that were previously isolated in different applications now appear as a unified list. The solution enables alarm dependencies, correlations, priorities and more, and provides automation capabilities that help to reduce manual tasks.

The NOC Manager remarks, “In the past, when an agent started their shift, they spent time reviewing a long list of alarms, checking ‘what's this and what's that’ simply to reach a sense of control. It was all too easy to miss an important alarm. With Compose Operation Platform, we use grouping and automation to make it easier to understand and work through the tasks.”

In addition, the Compose platform helps to increase visibility and collaboration across different teams. The NOC Manager further explains, “With the legacy systems operating separately, it was difficult to share work, whereas now we can open another person's list of alarms and jump in to help. Compose Operation Platform is really good from a management perspective, too, as I can see at a glance that an agent has an alarm list of ten rows, that they are up to date, and when they go to lunch, someone else can take over immediately.”

By examining which alarms occur most often and knowing more about root causes, the Nordic telecom operator will be better able to deliver its services reliably and cost-effectively. More importantly, in the long term, a deep understanding of network performance through enhanced reporting and analysis capabilities will help to optimize the company’s future investment commitments.

The OSS Architect adds, “We also selected add-ons from the Compose collection, including Virtual Operator, History Search, and Reports and Visualization packages, which will help us drive efficiency with functions such as automating operator tasks. For example, when we know that one alarm triggered another, such as during a power outage, we can use the grouping facility to help ensure we apply remediations in the order most likely to resolve the issue. We also just group the alarm to one row instead of having hundreds of alarms in the list, which greatly improves visibility and reduces complexity. In the next step, we will start to automate triage and remediation with the help of Virtual Operator.”

The NOC Manager concludes, “Working with Compose IT and Compose Operation Platform is really easy; if you have an idea and you ask if it's possible, it's very likely that they will say yes.”

Due to security reasons, the customer’s identity is hidden.