Clearway Network Management SolutionsClearway Network Management Solutions

Network Assurance Expert

Organizations are increasingly turning to Unified Communications to reduce costs, accelerate business processes and enhance productivity with next-generation applications such as:

  • Always-on e-mail and web conferencing
  • Single phone number with auto follow-me and forwarding to LAN or mobile phone
  • Presence and instant messaging
  • Innovative device offerings to assist the mobile workforce
  • Applications that can run on any device at any time

Service Providers delivering these Unified Communications solutions face numerous challenges to:

  • Understand and support complex data, voice, and video technologies from a variety of hardware and software vendors
  • Offer customized Service Level Agreements
  • Collect real-time performance data across devices and services
  • Manage customer satisfaction with proactive alerts and performance metrics
  • Provide comprehensive support that:
    • Allows instant problem identification that may span different devices and services
    • Facilitates multi-tiered support for quick problem resolution
    • Minimizes the need to rely on costly experts and customer site visits

Clearway Network Assurance Expert is the one tool that will allow your front-line support staff to proactively and quickly resolve any network issues, ensuring that your customers are satisfied with network performance and customer service while lowering your support costs. Its reporting tools will allow you to quantify customer benefits, identify bottlenecks, and plan for future expansion.

Service Provider Benefits

Unified Solution

  • Understand and support complex data, voice and video technologies
  • Offer customized Service Level Agreements
  • Collect real time performance data across devices and services
  • Manage customer satisfaction with proactive alerts and performance metrics

Smarter Knowledge Base

  • Allows instant problem identification that may span different devices and services
  • Facilitates multi-tiered support for quick problem resolution
  • Minimizes the use of expensive experts and costly customer site visits

Higher Customer Satisfaction

  • Define customized SLAs for different customers
  • Deliver rich interactive dashboards to customers that focus on providing SLA transparency
  • Proactive customer alerts for problem identification and resolution
  • Comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities

Lower Support Costs

  • Expert technical support knowledge captured in a comprehensive knowledge base
  • Level 1 support team requires less training and expertise to resolve complex support issues
  • Reduces need to hire and build highly specialized support engineering teams
  • The custom knowledge base can be enhanced as customer solutions evolve

Higher Revenue – Upsell

  • Identify upsell opportunities from performance and capacity data
  • Alerts can be configured to notify sales account managers of upsell opportunities

Features

Real time synchronization and aggregation of performance metrics across devices

  • Use of specialized software agents takes away the need for specialized hardware at the customer site
  • Hub-and-spoke architecture allows agents to be developed for any network device or service

Built-in rules-based Knowledge Base system

  • Define metrics for measuring performance of a customer’s end-to-end solution
  • Assign custom alerts and rules for key metrics
  • Define potential problems and build problem resolution scripts for support teams

Easy-to-use rich, interactive dashboard for support staff

  • Geography Dashboard highlights customers that need attention by location
  • Performance Dashboard provides a simple, consolidated view of customers’ key performance metrics at a glance
  • Support Dashboard allows analysis of current issues in the customer’s environment
  • Decision trees are displayed to enable the efficient resolution of problems

Details

Clearway Network Assurance Expert  Architecture

Clearway Network Assurance Expert is comprised of several components to enable efficient network management, support, and problem resolution.

Event Gateway

The Event Gateway allows for input of a wide array of information streams including telephony, data, streaming video, network events, and other time series data streams. Clearway Network Management Systems has worked with a variety of industry partners to create a hub-and-spoke system where partners can connect to the Clearway Network Assurance Expert hub via a standard web service interface.

Event Processing Layer

The event processing layer allows users, metrics, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to be defined and applied. This is where events are analyzed against the defined metrics, metrics are compared to KPIs, and actionable problem events are identified.

ETL

The ETL (extract, transform, and load) layer performs real-time transformation of the input data so that it can be processed by the knowledge base.

Knowledge Base

Problem events are compared to the knowledge base where rules are applied to generate alerts and escalations, but most importantly, to give the customer service representative an automated guide for resolving the problem. This automated diagnostic and remedy allows events to be worked by lower-level CSRs rather than immediately needing to be escalated to the engineering level for resolution. This provides both a quicker resolution of the problem for the customer and a much more cost-effective solution for the service provider. It substantially reduces the cost of problem resolution, while at the same time increasing SLA performance, providing better service to the customer.

Performance Dashboard

An interactive Performance Dashboard is provided to maximize ease of use and efficiency in detecting and resolving network issues. The dashboard is targeted primarily to non-technical customer service representatives, providing solutions to technical issues in a format understandable to users who do not have extensive technical training. Clearway Network Assurance Expert also meets the needs of the most demanding technical users.

Scalable High Performance Platform

Clearway Network Assurance Expert is highly scalable and extensible. It can be quickly deployed and scaled to the expanding operations of the service provider, incorporating additional network devices and higher volumes of network traffic. Our commitment to product development will continue to extend the capabilities of Clearway Network Assurance Expert by including features for real-time event probability, risk analysis, advanced analysis of the state of the network, event correlation, pattern recognition, provisioning, and security.