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FCAPS Series: Accounting
Management for Carrier Ethernet Welcome to the latest issue of Creanord EchoNEWS. EchoNEWS aims to keep you informed of developments at Creanord and in the fields of SLA assurance, automated Ethernet service delivery and OAM (Operations, Administration and Maintenance). This edition of EchoNews is part of a series on
EchoVault and FCAPS, providing guidance to
Communications Service Providers (CSPs) on
implementing the accounting part of FCAPS (Fault,
Configuration, Accounting, Performance and
Security in the ITU-T TMN model). Any complete
EMS/NMS platform should support a comprehensive
set of FCAPS functions and integrate seamlessly
with OSS/BSS systems. This edition focuses on
Accounting Management for Carrier Ethernet. FCAPS Accounting Management - The Network and the Numbers Accounting Management is the area of FCAP The first step toward fulfilling Accounting Management requirements is enabling resource usage data collection by ensuring that the inventory and network configuration information is available and up-to-date. EchoVault ensures this with the help of Plug & Go discovery. With this in place, the next step is to monitor the utilization of all relevant network resources. Integrated Configuration, Performance and Accounting Management allows automated customer associations and customer-specific service configurations. Moreover, optimal resource allocation can be provided by SLA based service provisioning. The data gathered can be used in order to gain insight into current usage patterns for trend analysis. Another part of Accounting Management are auditing tasks, which help verify the correctness in billing mechanisms and conformance of resource usage to SLAs. Finally, cost allocation caters for the appropriate charge assignment to specific resource usage. Creanord EchoVault supports the Service
Provider's Accounting Management needs with the
following functionality:
SLA based resource allocation ensures that each
service includes appropriate elements related to
Accounting Management functions. This ensures that
the relevant data is available to help the CSP
reach their goal of efficiently managing their
services. Linking the SLA to the configuration and
relating all gathered performance data to the SLA
enables full control of the assets also from a
business perspective, not just technically. Ensuring Profitable Operations with Accounting Management The domain of provisioning communications
services is a decidedly developed and competitive
field. Intelligent Accounting Management plays an
important role in the processes of the CSP,
because this is where the capability to make
profits is made. Further, the links to other FCAPS
functionality need to be tight to make possible
correct, efficient and lucrative operations.
Aligning business requirements with the network. Accounting Management with EchoVault aligns
business needs with other FCAPS areas and lets you
get the most out of your network assets thereby
helping to leverage the investment to the maximum.
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S that is
concerned with collecting resource consumption
data to enable capacity and trend analysis, cost
allocation, auditing and billing. For the purposes
of billing, Accounting Management needs to provide
information about users and their network resource
usage. For cost allocation it needs to provide
information about network asset usage. You might
say it is here that the link is made between the
network and its ability to provide you revenue. In
this way Accounting Management provides a key
process to connect available performance and
configuration data to your business targets.
