Page 355 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

3-146 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

internal and external activities, and notifies the other processes that are responsible for the imple-
mentation and configuration.
• Certify the Recovery of Normal Service Performance: These processes will perform the necessary
testing to achieve this purpose and make the necessary reports about the problem that occurred,
the root cause, and the activities carried out for restoration. It also will issue the trouble clearance
report to inform the CRM layer.
When trouble is reported by the customer, a trouble report may be sent to service problem resolution
for correction. When a trouble is identified by service problem resolution, then problem handling is
notified in order to inform the customer of the problem.
The processes deal with reactive versus proactive problem management.
Reactive problem management actions are needed where a problem has already affected the services
being provided to customers. However, it is desirable to detect and resolve problems prior to users being
affected by them, which is addressed by Proactive Problem Management.
Proactive Problem Management also includes planned maintenance outages. The aim is to have the
largest percentage of problems proactively identified and communicated to the customer, to provide
meaningful status, and to resolve them in the shortest time frame.
3.6.5.5 Service Quality Management Process
Service Quality Management (SQM) and impact analysis applications are designed to allow operators
to determine what levels of service they are delivering to their customers. Ideally these take a customer-
centric view, that is, the quality of service perceived by customers, but may measure additional service
metrics to allow the operator to be aware of approaching problems or degradations to service. Impact
analysis applications extend this capability to predict the likely impact of service degradations or net-
work problems on specific customers.
The Service Quality Management processes encompass monitoring, analyzing, and controlling
the performance of the service perceived by customers. These processes are responsible for restor-
ing the service performance for customers to a level specified in the SLA or other service key quality
indicator (KQI) descriptions as soon as possible. Once a problem has been detected and the root
cause diagnosed, this information is presented to the operations team using a variety of integrated
mechanisms. These mechanisms provide real-time notification and assignment of problems based
on a variety of alarm metrics, forward or escalate the problem details (problem cause, impact assess-
ment, and recommended corrective actions) to operational personnel or the systems responsible for
service restoration.
These processes monitor the service quality using events from Resource Management, using the qual-
ity to forecast whether SLA promises will be met, and to improve the service quality.
This process supports monitoring service or product quality on a service-class basis in order to deter-
mine whether:
• Service levels are being met consistently
• There are any general problems with the service or product
• The sale and use of the service is tracking to forecasts
Principal processes are:

• Monitor Service Quality: Extract the necessary information to feed the different quality analy-
sis processes. These processes collect and store all quality indicators related to the service, such
as congestion events and resource alarm events. The processes also perform automated service
testing using simulated standard user calling behavior, and collect data related to service usage,
which may supply information to other processes.
• Receive Alarm Information: Receives alarm information from network and network element sys-
tems, and tests and diagnoses information from test systems.