Towards a Timely Root Cause Analysis for Complex Situations in Large Scale Telecommunications Networks

Large scale telecommunications networks need to be continuously monitored to detect problems and react accordingly to ensure the networks stability. Current monitoring systems are well capable to monitor such large scale installations for simple situations like failing routers, links or abnormal link utilization. However, current systems fail to provide near real-time in-depth root cause analysis for nation scale networks. This is particularly important in cases where the monitoring dashboard is flooded with notifications caused by side-effects of one bigger failure. In our project we develop a processing system capable of providing this root cause analysis in a timely fashion even for large telecommunications networks. To cope with these challenges we defined a specialized processing model for the detection and analysis of complex error situations which is largely based on event stream processing mechanisms. In this paper we discuss the first stage of this process and its initial implementation.