MetaView Network Management
Today our network includes nineteen Metaswitch media gateways and nine call agent
servers deployed across seven states. Metaswitch's investment in MetaView reflects the fact
that they listen to their customers, and so understand that reducing operational complexity
is the key to our business success."
– GREG FLOERKE
Senior Vice President of Operations and Engineering
One Communications
At the core of every Metaswitch network, the MetaView Network Management
System (NMS) provides unified management with an easy-to-use graphical user interface.
Providing a unified management environment across the entire Metaswitch product range,
including MetaSphere, CommPortal, Universal Media Gateway and Media Resource Server,
MetaView significantly enhances your ability to reduce operational costs even as you
introduce compelling new services into your network.
MetaView NMS simplifies the management of your network through
close integration with all members of the MetaView family. These include:
- MetaView Web™ – An intuitive
web-based subscriber-management suite, specifically designed around the needs of your
provisioning and customer support staff.
- MetaView Explorer™ – A powerful
Java-based client that significantly enhances your ability to reduce operational costs
even as you introduce compelling new services into your network.
- Service Assurance Server™ – Advanced diagnostics
platform enabling your technicians to diagnose many common configuration,
network and interoperability problems, saving you time and money.
- Voice Quality Monitoring™ – Network-based system
for monitoring the quality of calls traversing your VoIP network that enables you
to more easily diagnose the cause and remedy for quality issues.
- SIP Provisioning Server™ – A revolutionary multi-tiered approach
to the provisioning and management of subscriber SIP devices.
POWERFUL MANAGEMENT TOOLS
At the core of every Metaswitch network, the MetaView Network Management System
provides provisioning, configuration, fault reporting, statistics and trouble-shooting services
across the entire Metaswitch product range. Designed to help you minimize your operational costs,
MetaView is both extremely powerful in its management capabilities as well as intuitive.
It offers a choice of user interfaces and a number of unique capabilities that address
the particular challenges of trouble-shooting, device configuration and service
quality control.
- Provisioning and Configuration – MetaView provides a range of methods
to suit different provisioning practices, via MetaView’s own user interfaces–MetaView Explorer
and MetaView Web–or via integration with an Operations Support System,
using MetaView APIs.
- Problem Management – MetaView manages alarms and logs and supports integration
with external alarm monitoring systems using standard protocols.
- Accounting – MetaView stores statistics in an open database, enabling you
to perform your own custom analyses, and outputs billing data in industry-standard formats.
- Security – MetaView manages user login credentials and privileges
and records audit trails of all configuration changes, providing a secure and customizable
framework for access control and management.
ARCHITECTURE
The MetaView platform, shown in the diagram below, is based on a three-tier
architecture, comprising
- the Network Elements being managed
- the MetaView Server, an aggregation entity which manages the
multiple network elements and presents an upstream SNMP/Corba interface to
the MetaView Explorer and Web clients and third-party OSS, billing,
and network monitoring platforms such as IBM Tivoli Netcool.
- the MetaView clients, including Metaview Explorer and MetaView Web.
In addition, the platform enables your subscribers to self-select and initiate new
services via the CommPortal™ Web interface. To assist you in supporting customers using
CommPortal, a Service Provider Login feature allows your customer service representatives to access and
modify CommPortal settings on behalf of a subscriber.
INTEGRATION AND BILLING
MetaView can be readily integrated into third-party OSS, billing
and network management systems via
- SNMP MIBs
- a Corba programming interface encapsulating the
underlying SNMP MIBs
- a northbound SOAP/XML interface.
All interfaces are fully documented.
External billing / mediation systems are easily integrated since the
MetaSphere Application Server generates industry-standard AMA-format (GR-1100 / GR-1343)
Call Detail Records, accessed by secure ftp.