A part of Tektronix' Unified Assurance offering, GeoProbe | APM (Advanced Performance Monitoring) helps you increase IP telephony and multimedia data service revenues while reducing operating costs and capital expenditures.

Through its ability to capture, decode, analyze and correlate widely deployed protocols running on your network, Tektronix' GeoProbe | APM enables you to proactively manage the quality and performance of your converged network services and elements.

Proactive Network Management

Through continuous, active monitoring of signaling, session control and media packets sent between network elements, GeoProbe | APM provides near real-time visibility of signaling and media performance.

• Establish alarm thresholds on KPIs to indicate an emerging problem when network performance starts to degrade—before your customers experience problems with their service.

Proactive performance management helps reduce the number of customer complaints, minimizes the time and costs associated with troubleshooting and repair and has a positive impact on customer satisfaction and churn. Combining proactive network management with periodic quality reporting enables you to capture and retain more revenue from your customers.

Alarming and Real-Time, Actionable Paths

Each management function (Registration, Authentication, Presence, Security and Session) is individually monitored. All performance is compared to user-definable quality thresholds. When thresholds are exceeded, alarms and alerts are created and the associated network element is specifically identified.

GeoProbe | APM provides a real-time, actionable path from the alarming and alerting process to facilitate problem detection and localization of the affected network element. Additional advanced troubleshooting tools are accessible through web-based call integration with the GeoProbe system for session tracing and problem resolution.

Quality Measurement through Statistics and KPIs

With GeoProbe | APM you can analyze actual traffic flows and individual transactions using passive monitoring to generate KPIs and statistics on the application, session control and the media layers. Determine how well customer registration requests, customer sessions, requests for services and authentication and authorization transactions are being processed by individual network elements. GeoProbe | APM provides the following information:

• Performance of registration and authentication transactions on an element-by-element basis.
• Session performance of all proxies, SBCs, redirect servers, application and feature servers and gateways in the network.
• Media Quality of Service including R-Factor and MOS scoring along with statistics on RTP and RTCP packets.

Flexible Historical Analysis

Using GeoProbe | APM, rapid service utilization and trending analysis and complex queries can be accomplished easily using embedded OLAP tools. Historical trending and utilization of services based on actual data from your network can facilitate network optimization studies, the timely application of capital resources and the ability to spot opportunities for building customized services bundles.

Increased Operational Efficiencies

IP multi-service networks are increasingly complex—putting a strain on the skill sets required by personnel to effectively manage your next-generation networks. GeoProbe | APM's intuitive KPI displays and actionable drill-down path can help reduce the troubleshooting time and skill levels required for Customer Care and Network Operations organizations.

GeoProbe | APM's GUI and actionable path capabilities are specifically designed to help simplify the triage process for trouble report resolution and problem analysis within a your network—increasing efficiencies through better utilization of higher level technical support.

Open Architecture

GeoProbe | APM works with and enhances the value of existing SQM and performance management systems. With open access to critical network service KPIs, GeoProbe | APM can easily be integrated with existing OSS, SQM, or SLA systems and processes.

Key Performance Indicator Indices

• By Calendar (Year, Month, Week, Day, Weekday Type, Weekday, Rate Period, Hour)
• By Source or Destination (Region, Node Type, Node Name, IP Address or Point Code)
• By Call Origination or Call Termination By Protocol (SIP Procedure, Release Cause Category and Release Cause)
• By Media (Bearer, Media Type: Voice, Video, Data, Text, and Codec)
• By Call Type (IP/IP, IP/PSTN, PSTN/IP, Mobile)
• By Media (Bearer, Media Type: Voice, Video, Data, Text, and Codec)
• By Call Type (IP/IP, IP/PSTN, PSTN/IP, Mobile)

Network Elements Supported

• Access Gateways, Application Servers, Media Servers, Interconnect Gateways, Call Control Agents, Media Gateways, Signaling Gateways, Soft switches, Session Border Controllers, Back-to-Back User Agents (B2BUA), Proxies, Registrars, Presence Servers, Redirect Servers

Network Functions Supported

• Registration, Authentication, Presence, Security, Mobility, Gateway, Media, IP-Centrex

Network Protocols

• SIP, SDP, RTP, RTCP, MGCP, ISUP (currently available)
• H.323, H.248, DNS, RADIUS, DHCP, HTTP, POP3, SMTP, TFTP, FTP, ENUM, LDAP, NTP, RTSP, DIAMETER (in development)

Reporting Capabilities

• Service Summary, Detailed Service Performance, Release Cause Faults Summary, Detailed Release Cause Faults, Element Faults, Long-term OLAP Analysis and Reporting Tools