Understanding Integrations with Oracle Products
This chapter provides information about Oracle products integrated with Oracle Communications Unified Assurance.
You can integrate the following Oracle products directly with Oracle Communications Unified Assurance:
-
Oracle Communications Session Border Controller (SBC)
-
Oracle Communications Unified Inventory Management (UIM)
About Integrating with SBC
An SBC is a network element that manages and protects real-time communication sessions. Oracle Communications Session Border Controller offers service providers security, interoperability, reliability, quality, regulatory compliance, and revenue optimization. See the Session Border Controller Documentation for more information about SBC, and Device Support Overview for information on the fault MIBs and devices tested against the Unified Assurance foundation rules for SBC devices.
You can integrate your SBC devices with Unified Assurance to monitor them in a network and get real-time insights about call traffic, signalling issues, session count, call security and quality, and network health and performance. After discovering the SBC devices in your network and building the network topology by using SOA applications, the devices send events like standard traps, security traps, and system management traps, and Unified Assurance polls them for performance metrics.
For example, you have two SBC devices in your network, to balance the load of incoming traffic and provide high availability. During a high demand period, one SBC device (SBC1) experiences power fluctuations, sending apSysMgmtPowerTrap with values power up and power down, then becomes completely unavailable, sending apSysMgmtSystemStateTrap with values becoming-offline and offline. In Unified Assurance, the trap messages appear as events, and in the topology view, SBC1 appears greyed out, indicating that it is not available.
With SBC1 down, the load on SBC2 increases, with values for performance metrics approaching the configured thresholds. The high volume risks overwhelming the only working SBC device, rendering it unresponsive.
In this scenario, Unified Assurance can help you spot a problem before it happens and identify the root cause to target your solution by:
-
Warning you and raising errors when the performance metric values for SBC2 are approaching or breach configured thresholds, before SBC2 becomes unresponsive.
See Metrics Examples and Thresholds for information about configuring a threshold policy.
-
Suppressing noise with supervised correlations.
See Supervised Correlation and Supervised Event Correlator for information about configuring supervised correlations.
-
Tracing the SBC2 events back to the initial SBC1 power failure event by using automatic root cause analysis.
See Understanding Root Cause Analysis for information about root cause analysis.
-
Locating the exact location of the device that breached the threshold in the topology view and the Vision map.
See Universal Topology User Guide and What is Vision? for information about the maps.
Metrics for SBC Devices
This section describes the classes of metrics that are collected from SBC devices:
-
Memory Usage and Utilization: Assesses the amount and percentage of memory consumed by the network devices, indicating resource availability.
-
Disk Usage: Evaluates the storage capacity utilized by the network devices, highlighting potential storage constraints.
-
Network Bandwidth Utilization: Measures the volume of data transmitted over the network, identifying potential congestion.
-
System Load: Encompasses various performance indicators that collectively assess the overall health and efficiency of network devices.
-
CPU Usage and Utilization: Measures the amount and percentage of processing power in use, indicating the processing load on the device.
-
Fan Speed and Status: Monitors the operational status and performance of cooling fans within network devices.
-
Power: Monitors the power supply to the devices in the network.
-
Temperature: Monitors device temperature to prevent overheating and ensures that the hardware operates within safe thermal limits.
Unified Assurance uses multiple metric types to collect relevant data when evaluating metrics. For example, power supply is measured using the data collected by the Voltage and Power Supply Status metric types. See Metric Types for more information about metric types and the interface for managing them.
About Integrating with UIM
UIM is an inventory management application that provides a real-time unified view of customer, service, and resource inventory, enabling customer service providers to develop and introduce new services more quickly and more cost effectively.
The inventory management capabilities of UIM include managing physical and logical resources, connectivity, networks and topology, services, life cycles, and business processes. See Unified Inventory Management Documentation to learn more about UIM.
Unified Assurance integrates with UIM through the TMF688 Event Processor microservice and the Kafka Bridge microservice. These microservices work with others in the Event pipeline to get events from the Event database, filter them for relevant alarms and thresholds, transform the filtered events into JSON format compliant with TMF688 and TMF642 specifications, and publish them to a Kafka topic using an external Kafka URI. UIM reads the events from the Kafka topic and acts on them to manage the inventory. See Understanding the Event Pipeline for more information about the flow.