| TP Overview | GOS Report |

Traffic & Performance Module Overview

The Traffic and Performance Reporting (TPR) application collects and processes traffic reports from one or more telephone switches, and produces reports based upon that data. TPR is designed to provide compatibility with different types of telephone switches. The current version of TPR supports the AT&T 5ESS, the Nortel SL-100/DMS-100, and the AGCS GTD-5. Logic for other switch types will be added as required.

The software does the following:

• Captures and records on disk all information routed to a selected switch traffic port.
• Provides an efficient mechanism for recalling the stored traffic reports by multiple users at different workstations.
• Processes the stored traffic reports to extract key statistical data. The information extracted is configurable by the user.
• Produces reports on the extracted statistics by hour and day of the week. "Busy hours" are automatically identified.
• Provides a mechanism to summarize the detailed statistics to a monthly history file.
• Produces reports on the stored history for analysis of long-term trends.

The TPR Grade of Service Option adds the following capabilities:

• Produces reports showing the calculated Grade of Service (based upon Erlang-B) and the number of trunks needed to provide the desired Grade of Service by trunk group and hour of the day.
• Identifies the "busy hour," by several measures, for each trunk group for the time period covered by the report.
• Provides Erlang-B calculations (Grade of Service and trunks needed) based upon manually entered figures.

View a sample Grade of Service Report.

A typical electronic switch can produce several different traffic reports. The format, content, and frequency of these reports vary from switch-to-switch, but they generally have one thing in common - they provide useful information in a non-useful format. For example, on an AT&T 5ESS, the most detailed of the traffic reports is the 30-minute traffic summary (called TRFC30). It lists half-hour summaries of many different parameters (such as peg counts, usage, and overflow) for each identifier in many different sections (such as trunk group, trunk unit, and attendant group). For most purposes, this report contains far more information than is needed over far too short a time period. The TPR module can be used to extract selected information from the reports to allow longer-period summaries (such as monthly statistics) to be printed.

Details of the traffic report formats and definitions of the parameters are generally contained in administrator documentation provided with the switch.

In a typical switch environment without the TPR module, the traffic data is transmitted periodically to a traffic port, which normally has a printer attached. A printed copy of the traffic report is produced as the switch generates it. Producing a longer term traffic analysis on even a single parameter involves digging through mounds of printed reports to find the information of interest, transcribing the data manually, and then tabulating the data by hand or with a software tool such as a spreadsheet.

The TPR module simplifies this process. A cable is connected between the switch traffic port and a telecommunications port on your computer system, usually through a buffer device. This connection enables the computer to monitor the traffic reports 24 hours per day. The operator can specify that certain sections of the report are to be processed. The contents of the recorded "raw" traffic reports can then be analyzed and stored in a statistical summary file to allow printing of summary reports.