Automated Lifecycle Management

In some ways, Lifecycle Management begins with the Capacity Management use case, where network plans for growth and contraction and where technology evolution is determined, and execution is initiated.

Tracking the usage of network resources to identify where capacity constraints may become an issue is a key enabler to planning and delivering network growth.

Real-time usage trends coupled with usage forecasts moderated by strategic objectives can ensure that costly investment is appropriately focused in a timely, just-in-time fashion.

Some of the physical equipment may need to be shipped to the customer for new service order line items; for modify or cease order lines existing equipment already in the customer’s possession may need to be returned/retrieved for recycling or reuse initiatives.

Stock may be picked and shipped from the telco’s warehouse, or they may have outsourced this to the stock vendor or another third party. Whatever the implementation, the telco must ensure that the equipment is correctly received by the intended recipient, and where not must have in place appropriate procedures to resend it if necessary.

There may need to be an installation of physical equipment, maybe in corporate data centres which will be undertaken by an in-house team, or there may need to be an outside plant installed with associated civil engineering works, or this may be a customer-facing service that is required to install e.g., a modem in a customer location, or to provide setup and training services at a customer house.

Where an outside plant such as street-side cabinets or last mile connectivity is to be installed, this may require appropriate licences or permission from local authorities for digging up roads, or agreeing wayleaves with landowners.

Scheduling and agreeing installation dates with customers can be an extended process with many changes. While not particularly complex, this can be an extended process with many information exchanges and reschedules as availability changes.

Before the in-house or subcontracted field force installation activities can begin, there may need to be some validations or preparatory actions undertaken; additionally, actions, such as undertaking safety-related commissioning tests, may also be required as part of the installation activities.

After installation has been completed there may need to be some standard data and service configuration to be provisioned on the equipment. The relevant inventory systems will need to be updated to reflect the new availability and status of the equipment, and of any physical and logical sub-components of it.

Being able to recognise Faults and Events in delivered services is a key component of Service Assurance. Automation tools like CORTEX can automate more than 99% of the faults leaving a very small number of faults, as opposed to tickets, to resolve. Fault and events are usually reported by network elements directly into the trouble ticketing system.

Once reported to the trouble ticketing system, the faults or events must then be classified, prioritised, and correlated with other reported faults. After the traffic is distilled, root cause analysis of the fault is performed by gathering data/evidence and applying heuristics/logic.

A set of rectification actions will be identified based upon the root cause, and these are applied to rectify the fault and resolve the issue.

If the fault cannot be rectified, then it may be possible to minimise the impact of the fault by, for example, re-routing traffic; fault rectification can then occur at a later time.

As part of this activity, a trouble ticket may be raised or updated in the trouble ticketing system; updates to this ticket will document the activities undertaken during the fault resolution activities.

This can be used as an audit of activities performed during a subsequent review of the incident; as input or supporting information to customer SLA reporting; or to ease the handoff between people of the issue. This process can be substantially automated, and in some cases fully automated.

Tracking the performance of network elements and the services they are delivering can help ensure that customer satisfaction is maintained, but can also be used to identify opportunities for cost mitigation, as well as to provide early indications of possible faults. Similarly, it is possible to track the Resource Compliance, more than the condition of network elements, this should identify that they meet the cyber compliance and manufacturers’ compliance requirements.

A typical self-healing automation process would identify:

• Known configuration of an element and confirm its compliance,
• Known configuration of an element and confirm its failure with compliance.
• This can be fully automated and will self-heal. Similarly, the same automation can be used to determine:
• If there is no known configuration of an element, which would trigger work to establish said configuration, the to build automation routines and bring the elements under automated governance and,
• Which elements are not checked for configuration or compliance. This would lead to more substantial work with the CMDB/inventory systems to properly identify elements, then to establish said configuration, to build automation routines and so on.

In the current climate of TSA, NIS2 and similar legislative requirements, an automated LCM process is vital.

The Performance Management use case monitors current network resources for over or under-threshold KPIs, and also for long-term trends (either in real-time or on a scheduled or on-demand basis). When a monitored performance threshold is breached, an event can be generated, which will initiate the Fault or Event Management use cases.

Problem Management is a set of use cases aimed at preventing incidents or reducing their impact. Following the successful resolution of a fault, lessons learned are extracted and changes made to the network or service architecture (to avoid or limit the fault impact), or to the fault diagnosis and resolution activities (to limit its impact and to reduce mean time to resolution). Potentially, the KPIs and their associated thresholds monitored as part of the Performance Management use cases may also be modified as a result of these use cases.

Ensuring appropriate Access Management to systems and data is also critically important. Access must be controlled and maintained on an as-needed basis, and auditing that access on a regular basis is a key requirement not just for cybersecurity but also for Service Assurance.

Limiting the access to network-related systems and data by unauthorised, unqualified or malicious people limits their ability to change configurations that might adversely affect network operation or service quality.