39 Configuring Balance Monitoring in Pipeline Manager

This chapter describes Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Balance Monitoring Manager.

You use balance monitoring to enable your customers to monitor the balance of a group of accounts. Balance monitoring collects the balance impacts for a specified group of accounts and services, and notifies customers when their balance is too high. Customers and CSRs can also access the group's total balance at any time by using a custom client interface.

For information about balance monitoring, see BRM Accounts Receivable.

About Balance Monitoring and Pipeline Rating

Pipeline Manager processes monitored balances as follows:

1. Pipeline modules rate the event and apply any discounts.

2. The FCT_Account module determines whether the event owner belongs to any monitor groups and, if it does, enriches the MONITOR_LIST section of the EDR container with information about each monitor group.

   Note:

   DAT_AccountBatch stores in-memory the list of monitor groups to which an account or service belongs. The module retrieves this information from the BRM database when you first start Pipeline Manager and when you create, modify, or delete a monitor group. For more information, see "About Synchronizing Monitor Data between Cycle-fee and Pipeline Batch Rating".

3. The FCT_BillingRecord module generates a monitor packet for each monitor group.

   • When a balance packet impacts the event balance group, FCT_BillingRecord creates a MONITOR_PACKET for each monitor group in the monitor list.

   • When a balance packet does not impact the event balance group (for example, the discount share or charge share event balance groups), FCT_BillingRecord calls DAT_AccountBatch to retrieve the monitor group list for the discount share or charge share owner's balance group.

   The MONITOR_PACKET contains an account POID of the balance monitor, the balance group ID from the monitor group, balance element ID, amount, sub-balance impact, and the sub-balance block from the balance packet.

4. The pipeline generates an output file that includes any monitor balance impacts.

5. Rated Event (RE) Loader retrieves the pipeline output file and publishes any monitored balance impact data to the monitor queue.

About Synchronizing Monitor Data between Cycle-fee and Pipeline Batch Rating

Pipeline batch rating and cycle-fee rating determine where to apply balance monitor impacts by accessing each member's list of monitor groups. For cycle-fee rating, this information is stored in each member's /ordered_balgrp object in the BRM database. For pipeline batch rating, this information is stored in memory by the DAT_AccountBatch module.

When you create, modify, or delete a balance monitor, BRM updates each member's /ordered_balgrp object and then uses the EAI framework and Oracle DM to send the updated information to Pipeline Manager, as follows:

1. BRM updates the member's /ordered_balgrp object and generates one of the business events listed in Table 39-1.

   Table 39-1 Monitor-Related Actions

   Action	Event
   Create a new monitor group	/event/group/sharing/monitor/create
   Modify a monitor group by adding or removing members	/event/group/sharing/monitor/modify
   Delete a monitor group	/event/group/sharing/monitor/delete

2. The EAI framework and Oracle DM processes these business events and publishes them to the AQ database queue.

3. Pipeline Manager retrieves the data from the AQ database queue and updates its internal memory:

   • The DAT_Listener module retrieves the data from the queue and passes it to DAT_AccountBatch.

   • The DAT_AccountBatch module refreshes the monitor group list for all accounts.

Enabling Balance Monitoring in Pipeline Manager

Pipeline Manager determines whether balance monitoring is enabled by using the BalanceMonitoring entry from the multi-bal instance of the /config/business_params object.

You must configure Pipeline Manager to use business parameter settings from the BRM database by performing the following:

• Configuring the DAT_PortalConfig module in your registry file. This module must be listed before all other data modules in the registry file.

• Connecting the DAT_AccountBatch module to DAT_PortalConfig by using the PortalConfigDataModule registry entry.

Note:

You must enable balance monitoring in Pipeline Manager to have notification events generated during the batch rating process.