Saturday, January 21, 2006
How are you feeling?
Laying in my bed this week with a sore throat and fewer has got me thinking that systems are much like humans, when something go wrong or when it is not behaving as it should, you need ways to determine the cause of the problem. With us humans we go to the doc, he will start with a general exam, checking for a fewer, taking a blood test, checking for other symptoms. So to make a judgement of how badly sick we actually are.
IP-Telephony systems are much like us humans, very complex, with many features being executed in the ATA, with a complex core system divided in to many peaces such as registrar, proxies and application server and also an interconnect to the PSTN, it is very hard to know what parts of the system that is ill or if all parts of the service are functioning as they should.
When customers call in complaining about that the telephony is not working, it is hard for the support to take a "quick blood test" to get a first view of how sick the service is? Have all parts of the architecture been healthy at the exact same point that the customer was complaining about, did the modem flap? Restarted? Was the ATA registered? Was the call authorized by the proxy? Was the databases OK? Was the interconnect OK? And this is just the simple service, with a more complex service it becomes more and more difficult to actually set a diagnose.
This is something that has too be worked on by vendors of ATA, modems, proxy servers, gateways and so on, but not least by the operator to demand this functionality from the systems involved. With the human body it is hard to add more features... But with a system we can of course put as many health features as we wish. New standards are needed, how do we send health statistics, what information is sent are questions we need to answer.
I see even more complex services coming and for them to become successful and appreciated as a stable and reliably source of communication we need to be able to help the customer when they are experiencing problems and we need to help them immediately. Not solve the problem in a few months.
IP-Telephony systems are much like us humans, very complex, with many features being executed in the ATA, with a complex core system divided in to many peaces such as registrar, proxies and application server and also an interconnect to the PSTN, it is very hard to know what parts of the system that is ill or if all parts of the service are functioning as they should.
When customers call in complaining about that the telephony is not working, it is hard for the support to take a "quick blood test" to get a first view of how sick the service is? Have all parts of the architecture been healthy at the exact same point that the customer was complaining about, did the modem flap? Restarted? Was the ATA registered? Was the call authorized by the proxy? Was the databases OK? Was the interconnect OK? And this is just the simple service, with a more complex service it becomes more and more difficult to actually set a diagnose.
This is something that has too be worked on by vendors of ATA, modems, proxy servers, gateways and so on, but not least by the operator to demand this functionality from the systems involved. With the human body it is hard to add more features... But with a system we can of course put as many health features as we wish. New standards are needed, how do we send health statistics, what information is sent are questions we need to answer.
I see even more complex services coming and for them to become successful and appreciated as a stable and reliably source of communication we need to be able to help the customer when they are experiencing problems and we need to help them immediately. Not solve the problem in a few months.
# posted by Maria jernström @ 1/21/2006 05:44:00 PM 
