Proactive maintenance tools for transaction oriented wide area networks

The motivation of the work presented in this paper comes from a real network management center in charge of supervising a very large hybrid telecommunications/data transaction-oriented network. We present a set of tools that we have developed and implemented in the AT&T Transaction Access Services (TAS) network, in order to automate and facilitate the process of diagnosing network faults and identifying the potentially affected elements, resources and customers. Specifically in this paper we describe the development implementation and use of the following systems: (a) the TAS Information and Tracking System (TIMATS) that provides a common framework for the storage and retrieval of provisioning, capacity management and maintenance data; (b) the Transactions Event Viewer (TEVIEW) system that generates, filters, and presents diagnostic events that indicate system occurrences or conditions that may cause a degradation of the service; and (c) the Transaction Instantaneous Anomaly Notification (TRISTAN) system which implements an adaptive network anomaly detection software that detects network and service anomalies of TAS as dynamically defined violations of the base-lined performance characteristics and profiles