Optic’s Network Forensics gives you a comprehensive view of your network’s usage and performance with a clear vision of your network challenges and opportunities. Optic’s network traffic data decomposition and trend analysis expose the root cause of current and impending service issues along with providing the basis for accurate capacity planning and network design. Optic lets you see your network your way to quickly assess metrics for call counts, hours of usage, peak utilization and more to mitigate service risks and improve the cost performance of your voice network.
Usage & Trend Analysis
There are a variety of dashboards to view your network usage trends, but let’s start with a high-level picture. The Network Year over Year Call Trends dashboard captures cyclical patterns in calls and usage carried over all your network facilities. View trends broken out by incoming, outgoing and total traffic. By toggling between month and week views, you can quickly understand the months and weeks that drive higher or lower traffic volumes. The example displays entire enterprise but you can quickly filter for individual voice servers or trunk groups or routes.
If you prefer a table view to see call counts, Optic has you covered. The Network Calls Summary dashboard shows seizure counts by entity (trunk group or route). You can quickly identify network entities that have high call volumes or problems with call failures.
Data Decomposition
Optic’s data decomposition depicts how well your network resources are supporting desired call activity versus how much capacity is being consumed servicing failed or fraudulent activity. Dashboards such as Trunk Group Performance Summary quickly highlight these trends and percentages. A Normal Call Resolution indicates the call completed as expected with one of the parties hanging up. All other conditions may indicate some type of failure in the call process. In this example, up to 25% of monthly calls were Called Number Failures. User can quickly drill into daily detail to uncover trends or abnormal spikes in activity.
Capacity Planning
As you understand your usage trends and the data decomposition of valid versus failed or fraudulent calls, Optic will help you understand if you are paying for capacity that is not servicing valid calls. To dig more into your capacity utilization, Optic offers options but let’s start by looking into peak percent utilization.
The Network Utilization dashboard highlights peak capacity for the last 30 days. The blue bar represents the number of channels currently configured while the diamond marks the maximum number of channels used during the report period. The peak percent channel utilization is also included. In this example, note the highest peak percentage was only 40%. For this timeframe, it appears the network has a lot of capacity that is not being used.
The high-level view has value, but additional insight is gained by drilling into detail. By clicking on a blue bar, see the utilization by hour trending. Quickly note any trends or aberrations in activity that may account for elevated peak utilization. Or confirm if your current capacity is too much or not enough. In the example below, the peak capacity consistently remained under 40 percent and could indicate a potential for savings by disconnecting circuits. You can use the filter to expand the date range to assure you have a complete picture before implementing capacity changes.
As you are starting a SIP migration or continuing to manage your SIP or hybrid network, knowing your network’s channel usage is critical data for contract negotiation and management of both equipment and network service providers. By seeing your usage trends and capacity thresholds in Optic, you can decide if flat rate, burstable or a blend of both is optimal for your unique network and budget. To begin to understand how Optic can eliminate over-subscription to drive down service provider costs and system maintenance fees, let’s look at Optic’s Concurrent Call Paths (CCP) analytics.
The Network Concurrent Call Paths dashboard includes the “Maximum Channels in Use by Day” chart showcasing the maximum number of concurrent channels (or trunks) used at any point within a day across the enterprise. In many cases, it is inbound hacking call attempts with hundreds or thousands of very short calls that drive the spikes you may see in CCP. From the enterprise view, Optic offers analytics to highlight your network’s maximum number of concurrent call paths for an individual circuit or a voice communication server and then drill down to the details.
Networks are dynamic. Optic for Voice Networks gives you visibility into your current and historical usage, performance and capacity metrics. And with these analytics, Optic will help you create optimum resourcing designs and strategies. Contact us today to learn more about network monitoring and optimization and putting Optic to work for you.
