TM Forum has a set of interfaces that are designed to manage converged networks. These interfaces incorporate the best components of TM Forum’s widely adopted Interface Suites (OSS/J and MTOSI), as well as input from 3GPP, and are being built to become a key part of TM Forum’s API family to manage networks and services in the converged environment.
Here is a list of the types of TIP (Operations Management) Interfaces:
- Service Problem Management
- Inventory
- Security
- Fault Management
- Policy Management
- Performance Management
- Expedited Interfaces
Service Problem Management
The Service Problem Management Business Agreement document provides requirements and use cases for service problem management, i.e., the management of problems that cause one or more services to function at a level below what was committed to the customer. In terms of requirements, the concept of a service problem is defined (this is basically a static requirement). This is followed by several dynamic requirements in the following areas:
- service problem notifications
- service problem control, i.e., the creation, modification and deletion of service problems
- service problem subscription
- service problem retrieval.
The requirements are followed by several use case that provide non-prescriptive flows in support of the requirements. Each use case is traced back to one or more requirements. Further, requirement – use case traceability matrices are provided.
The TM Forum business agreement starts with several “end-to-end” service problem scenarios that cover a subset of the topic of interest in this document. This is done to clearly set the context for the issue at hand (service problem management) and to make clear what is and what is not in scope.
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Generic query
The Generic Query Interface is a task centric solution with powerful capabilities to query a system exposing an object oriented information model.
This Interface is independent of the underlying information model and may be applied to various information models including the SID model.
This flexibility allows for considering this Interface as a pattern that can easily apply to a large variety of problem space from various domains adapted and integrated to create more complex interfaces for specific management purposes and specific domains (e.g. Resource Inventory, Service Inventory, Catalog Management)
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Basic Resource Inventory
The Inventory team is developing a set of Generic Interfaces for Query, Update, Notification and Import/Export . The intention is that these Generic Interfaces may be used in different contexts or for different purposes not necessarily limited to pure Inventory.
The Resource Inventory Interface solution makes a direct use of the artifacts and capabilities of these Generic Interfaces. We call this Interface the “Basic Resource Inventory” Interface; it is applicable to the management of Resources from the TM Forum Information Model (a.k.a. SID Resource ABE).
This Basic Resource Inventory Interface can be further extended by adding more specific capabilities not supported by the generic patterns; as example, such an extension, called the “Extended Resource Inventory” Interface, will be specified in order to maintain backward compatibility with respect to specific requirements and use cases from the MTOSI 2.1 MRI.
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Enterprise Entity Management – Operator User Management
Multi-vendor networks in typical Service Provider environment are managed using multiple proprietary management systems supplied by the vendors. In order to ensure a secure and consistent management of the network there is a need for uniformly and centrally provisioning operators working on these management systems. Added to this is the need for individual Service Providers to be able to implement specific authorizations based on the local situations.
TM Forum’s business agreement specifies use cases and requirements for an interface by which it makes it possible for Service Providers to consistently provision operator’s (who are effectively the users of the management systems) access rights and authorities across the system. Also it deals with auditing the results of the said provisioning operations.
TM Forum’s information agreement describes the technical specification for an operator user management interface.
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Enterprise Entity Management – Single Sign On
The Inventory team is developing a set of Generic Interfaces for Query, Update, Notification and Import/Export . The intention is that these Generic Interfaces may be used in different contexts or for different purposes not necessarily limited to pure Inventory.
The Resource Inventory Interface solution makes a direct use of the artifacts and capabilities of these Generic Interfaces. We call this Interface the “Basic Resource Inventory” Interface; it is applicable to the management of Resources from the TM Forum Information Model (a.k.a. SID Resource ABE).
This Basic Resource Inventory Interface can be further extended by adding more specific capabilities not supported by the generic patterns; as example, such an extension, called the “Extended Resource Inventory” Interface, will be specified in order to maintain backward compatibility with respect to specific requirements and use cases from the MTOSI 2.1 MRI.
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Security Compliance Audit
The Inventory team is developing a set of Generic Interfaces for Query, Update, Notification and Import/Export . The intention is that these Generic Interfaces may be used in different contexts or for different purposes not necessarily limited to pure Inventory.
The Resource Inventory Interface solution makes a direct use of the artifacts and capabilities of these Generic Interfaces. We call this Interface the “Basic Resource Inventory” Interface; it is applicable to the management of Resources from the TM Forum Information Model (a.k.a. SID Resource ABE).
This Basic Resource Inventory Interface can be further extended by adding more specific capabilities not supported by the generic patterns; as example, such an extension, called the “Extended Resource Inventory” Interface, will be specified in order to maintain backward compatibility with respect to specific requirements and use cases from the MTOSI 2.1 MRI.
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Resource Alarm Management
There is a strong desire from Service Providers to provide a Fault Management interface that can be used in a simple way to do simple alarm reporting while also covering more complex OSS-to-OSS scenarios. The Resource Alarm Management interface should support both and not add complexity when used in the context of Simple Alarm Reporting. Maintenance, Protection and Alarm Control A Business Agreement, Information Agreement and a special package with both agreements, Release Notes, Tigerstripe modules, generated WSDL and XSD files for RAM, and supporting material are all available for this interface.
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Maintenance, Protection and Alarm Control
To ease the migration to the Resource Alarm Management (RAM) Interface for users of MTOSI, the additional pieces of MTOSI that are not in RAM are available in the Maintenance, Protection and Alarm Control (MPAC) interface. There is a Business Agreement, Information Agreement and a special package that includes both agreements and Release Notes, Tiger models for MPAC, generated WSDL and XSD files for MPAC, and supporting material.
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Policy Management
Policy Information Exchange (PIE) Interfaces include a Business Agreement that covers the business scenarios, requirements and use cases for the exchange of policy information on a very general level and with some practical examples. Exchange of Policy Information between different domains is addressed as well as the questions of synchronization, negotiation and event reporting.
The Business Agreement also touches the use of PIE for PBAC, spectrum control policy, CoS/QoS policy for MPLS VPNs, OSS service orchestration, Pricing rules exchange and more.
In addition to that, the very basic set of Interfaces (create, read, update, delete) for policy information has been modeled and the Information Agreement and Interface Implementation Specifications have been generated. The scope of the interfaces covers policy business objects as well as policy specification related objects to allow for the exchange of definitions of invariable properties in policies.
The information model for the interfaces is strictly based on the Policy ABE in the Common Business Entities Domain of the Information Framework, with the addition of 3 new associations to allow for the mapping of policies to Products, Services and Resources.
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Performance Management
As the communication world transforms to a service-oriented system, the next generation Service Providers (SP) have to deal with multi-technology, multi-vendor networks. The Service Providers not only have to provide a varied set of services to their customers but also need to contend with the pressure on the networking resources as the services multiply. In such a scenario, it is essential that the SP has a consistent view of the performance and utilization of the entire network. Only then can the SP efficiently utilize and plan the network resources available at his disposal.
As various technologies have developed over time the standards for monitoring the performance of the Network Elements for these have come to differ. This makes it very difficult to extract and correlate the Performance information. The aim of this document is to consolidate the underlying requirements behind PM Information interfaces from different technologies so that the SP is aware at all times of end-to-end performance and utilization of the network. This would also facilitate the SP in visualizing the performance of various services deployed in the network.
This interface functionality is closely related to Resource Problem Management and Resource Management. Along with Resource Problem Management, the Performance Management functionality provides inputs to the Service Assurance Modules of OSS.
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Expedited Interfaces
TM Forum is launching a program that will enable very rapid development of new standardized interfaces based on our widely implemented Information Framework (SID). New interfaces would be created using a set of open source tools and would provide Query, Update, and Notification operations for some of the Information Framework ABEs that are not currently covered by existing interfaces.
The first of these interfaces provides an analysis of the SID Customer ABE with respect to basic interface needs related to query and update. “Query” refers to the retrieval of object instances (in this cases instances of various classes defined in the Customer ABE). “Update” refers to the creation, modification and deletion of object instances. Both the Query and Update capabilities are intended to be subsets of the Generic Query and Generic Update patterns. The said analysis is followed by requirements and use cases.
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