Unattended Call-Out

Traditionally, you have several choices in providing unattended maintenance coverage and call-out for your network through your OSS:

  1. You can gear up to staff your network 24/7 to keep watch on the indicators provided by your OSS. This is one of the most effective ways of providing coverage for your network but is also the most costly and it does have its problems. Often, you will hire entry level personnel to staff the OSS after hours and have them perform call-outs when they see critical alarms. Most critical and costly failures are almost always proceeded by seemingly less important indicators. Historically, most unrecoverable AMA failures are indicated only by a network or hard drive failure that inexperienced personnel thought was unimportant. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been lost by companies like yours as a result. 
  2. You can “roll-up” your system to a monitoring center after hours. This is less costly than staffing 24/7 but it invites even bigger problems. Most monitoring centers are handling more than just your network. They don’t know your network as well as you do and often they must prioritize their handling of your network failures against the needs of other networks that they are monitoring. When conditions are good, monitoring centers tend to do a reasonable job. However, when conditions are less favorable, say a major storm is moving through the area, they quickly become overwhelmed by the quantity of alarms being managed. Many important alarms get overlooked and lost in the threshold of priorities. This can result in costly service affecting outages that remain unresponded to. Worse yet, the monitoring center’s monitoring systems can (and do) crash in such overload conditions, leaving your network completely uncovered and your maintenance personnel grasping in the dark for a recovery strategy. 
  3. You can check your screens in the morning to see what broke over night. We’ve seen this strategy used before, rarely without disastrous results. Your system operates 6144 hours per year. Subtract from that a standard work week and your system is exposed to unmanaged failures for 4064 hours! Worse, by the time problems are detected and responded to, your customers are already complaining and some of them have signed contracts with the competition. You take a double hit - above normal maintenance costs and unmanageable customer churn rates.

There is a fourth answer. Add an ArTrac G4 Fault Management and 2-Way Notification plug-in to augment your existing OSS solution to provide you with intelligent 24 hour interactive notification of outages. ArTracTM G4 is smart. It knows who is responsible for what piece of equipment and when. Its ultra-reliability means that it is on top of your network problems and never misses a thing! It offers the following features: