Provisioning

Provisioning involves:

1. Creating the customer In the context of the Cloud Monetisation Platform, an individual or organisation who has signed an agreement to take goods and services from a service provider. A customer receives a bill associated with one or more subscriptions, and can be a single end user or a large company with many subscriptions assigned to one agreement. in the system.
2. Making the customer active on the network In the context of CMP, the infrastructure on which usage of registered customers will be measured – this could be a mobile phone network, broadband network or other non-telecommunications network.. This step includes any non-hardware activation such as software capability or insurance.

This involves the following job(s):

• Provisioning

  Provisioning actions, initiated via the creation of workflow events, progress to a status of Awaiting Network Services as the Workflow Monitor job processes the relevant workflows. This job detects the provisioning In telecommunications, the setup of equipment, wiring and transmission to deliver services to a customer. actions and, when appropriate, writes to a Network Request table, which is monitored by daemons responsible for generating a target-specific command and transmitting the command to the external system.

  This job detects workflow event Actioned Item records with a status of Awaiting Network Service.

  For each record:

  • Gathers related details
  • Creates a Network Request Log record (in status Unprocessed)
  • Updates the status of the workflow event Actioned Item record to Sent To Network.
• Bill Cycle Change

  In a real-time charging (RTC Real Time Charging. Also known as an Online Charging System (OCS), a system that allows service providers to charge customers in real time, based on their service usage.) environment, when a post-paid subscription A billing entity that incurs a charge. Examples include a network attached device whose usage you want to measure and charge for, or a monthly software subscription's bill cycle day is changed, the external RTC system creates new allowance and spend cap A service for customers that applies a limit to how much usage a customer can consume outside of their allowances or bolt-on extras, preventing spending over a certain amount. records that take effect at the start of the subscription's new bill cycle. These new records must be synchronised with CMP Converged Monetisation Platform. The MDS Global product that supports customer care and billing for digital service providers. records in order to allow for real-time enquiry of allowance and spend cap A limit on a subscriber's service. balances from CMP. Following a bill cycle change, new records generated by the RTC system are stored in CMP.

  When the new records are due to come into effect, this job is triggered to update CMP allowance and spend cap records to refer to the new records.

The following daemons are associated with Provisioning:

Type	Category	Activity	Details
Transmission	Provisioning	OCS adaptor	The adapter that communicates to the network of the Online Charging System (OCS) in order to execute network commands.
Load	Provisioning	From Generic Format	This daemon collects and decrypts generic CMP files and creates the CMP batches, which are available for processing into CMP by the appropriate batch job.
Extract	Provisioning	To Generic Format	This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files, which are available for conversion to third party format.
Transmission	Provisioning	Openet Bill Cycle adaptor	The adapter that communicates to the Openet network to execute network commands.
Load	Provisioning	From Generic Format (Bill Cycle Change)	This daemon loads details of spend cap and allowance records that were created or updated on the OCS as a result of a bill cycle change. A dedicated job will subsequently reconcile these OCS records with CMP allowance and spend cap records.
Extract	Provisioning	To Generic Format (Bill Cycle Change)	This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files, which are available for conversion to third party format.

The following probes can be run against jobs and daemons in Provisioning:

Stage	Category	Name	Type	Description
Verification	Provisioning	Normal	Alert	Alert probe monitoring whether the job is running without large amount of records falling into an error state.
Verification	Provisioning	Punctual	Alert	Alert probe monitoring the punctual execution of the job.