Managing and Controlling

Organizations must be able to manage real-time services as well as or better than their traditional applications. They also must be able to exert control over users, access, sessions, services, policies, and provisioning to ensure compliance and deliver business results. The Covergence Session Manager provides any FCAPS compliant management systems (i.e. HP OpenView, Tivoli, etc.) with media quality statistics (MoS), network & link utilization information, routing and signaling details on a per-session basis and visibility into all SIP activity on the network

Managing Real-time Services

The comprehensive session and application management capability of Covergence Session Manager (CSM) are invaluable to shortening the time it takes to deploy new "production-class" real-time services. CSM gives organizations the tools they need to manage their SIP-based applications and services including:

• Session detail recording enables organizations to record the usage of SIP-based services and applications for accounting, billing and regulatory compliance purposes
• Session trace capabilities enable organizations to record and display detailed session trace information for troubleshooting, network engineering, capacity planning and forensic analysis
• Quality of service (QOS) monitoring and mean opinion score (MOS) calculation enables organizations to monitor and track the actual quality of service experienced by users or subscribers
• Comprehensive logging capabilities enables managers to track system and administratively defined events, alarms and faults

Controlling Real-time Services

CSM enforces policy-based control over multimedia services from a single point in the service infrastructure. CSM classifies every SIP signaling and media session based on its physical, data link, network, session and application-level characteristics, enabling the application of policies to individual sessions with extremely high resolution. Policy can be used to:

• Restrict or control the types of SIP messages and SIP-associated media streams that cross the network edge, or the types of devices users are allowed to use.
• Guarantee consistent policy enforcement across all forms of communication even multi-modal sessions, as would be the case with a session that started with IM and escalates to a call.

CSM control policies can be defined locally via native CSM management interfaces (CLI, GUI, etc), pulled from standard authentication, authorization and accounting systems (RADIUS, DIAMETER, etc) or pushed onto CSM from external applications via web services interfaces (SOAP, WSDL, etc).

The CSM web services interfaces provides the ability to dynamically control calls (start, fork, terminate), based on pre-defined policy, by connecting sessions into operations and support systems. Web services are also used to automate the provisioning of new users.