inPilot Overview

inPilot Overview
 
 
This chapter provides an overview of the inPilot application.
This chapter describes the following topics:
 
Introduction
The inPilot is a Web-based application providing a unified reporting interface for diverse data from Cisco Systems In-line service and storage applications.
 
The inPilot application enables:
This release of inPilot only supports generating HTML-based historical canned reports displaying data in graphical—graphs/charts—and tabular formats. Reports for ad-hoc periods are not supported. For information on the report types supported, see the Report Types section.
The inPilot application provides comprehensive and consistent set of statistics and customized reports, and report scheduling and distribution from chassis / in-line service product. For example, a subscriber's Quality of Experience, top 10 users, and so on.
The inPilot application provides reporting capability for Content Filtering Reporting Engine (CF-RE) data, bulk statistics, EDRs data from in-line service and storage applications. The inPilot application facilitates and enhances the operators’ ability to simply and easily determine the health and usage of the network.
Important: The inPilot receives the data in terms of EDRs which are generated based on the flow. As the EDRs are flow-based and the bulkstats is a real-time data, the volumes reported in the EDR are different from the volumes reported by bulkstats.
For more information on using the inPilot application to generate reports, see the inPilot Online Help documentation.
 
Report Types
The inPilot application supports generation of canned statistical reports that can be used to analyze network performance, and decide the policies for users, and identify the customer trends, network usage patterns, network categorization, etc. The reports can be per gateway, or multiple gateways (region), or for the overall network. The reports can be generated for the usage of different entities such as gateway, content type, etc on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
 
The typical canned reports that are supported for the inPilot application include:
The inPilot application provides the following reports:
The usage traffic is expressed in terms of megabytes (MB) or Megabits per second (Mbps) and percentage (%). The traffic can also be in gigabytes (GB) / kilobytes (KB) / bytes depending on the magnitude.
After identifying the total amount of transferred data per subscriber, and identifying the top users, to understand the protocol and services breakdown for each subscriber, this report allows listing the different applications used by the top 10/100/1000 subscribers.
The CF-RE report provides the summary of traffic over CF categories, CF actions, and CF ratings. The CF actions that can be taken on the URL are as follows:
The CF ratings can be one of the following:
The CF-RE report also provides the list of top N subscribers and URLs based on their unique subscriber’s hit count and total usage.
Important: Please note that the subscriber’s private data like Mobile Station Integrated Services Digital Network (MSISDN) will appear encrypted in all the subscribers reporting. Users with administrative privilege can only decrypt the MSISDNs using a shell script utility. For information on how to use this script, refer to the inPilot Administration and Management chapter in this guide.
 
Exporting Reports to Other File Formats
 
The inPilot application supports exporting reports to the following file formats:
Microsoft Excel format: To export a report to Microsoft Excel format, use the get_excel_report script. For more information about this script, refer to the Generating Reports in Excel Format section in the inPilot Administration and Management chapter of this guide.
PDF format: To export a report to PDF format, in the HOME and DPI REPORTS tabs of the inPilot GUI, click the Export to PDF button. The PDF file is displayed in a new window and can be saved for future reference.
If there is no data available for a report, the Export to PDF button is disabled.
 
inPilot Architecture
 
The inPilot solution consists of two components — a server and a GUI client. The following figure shows a typical organization of the inPilot solution.
 
Internal Architecture of inPilot
The server components include:
The generators archive the files once they are parsed. In archival, the files are zipped and placed in the configured location.
 
Some of the components at the client side include Django and Mod_python.
 
Distributed Architecture of inPilot
inPilot supports the distributed model to allow the deployment which enables network wide view or work load balancing. Newly introduced component, Remote Data Processor (RDP), plays the role of pre-processing the input files from gateways. One or more RDPs, installed separately on remote machines can be registered to a master inPilot and one RDP can process files from one or more gateways.
 
RDP periodically sends the intermediate data to registered master inPilot. The role of inPilot in such deployments is mostly for report generation, report viewing, RDP management and optionally data processing.
Important: RDP installation and registration is required only for network wide deployments. For standalone installation no RDP is required. For information on how to install the RDP, refer to the Managing inPilot Installation chapter of this guide.
Important: RDP and inPilot must be installed, upgraded, and uninstalled separately.
Important: Before registering RDP with the master inPilot, ensure that the RDP is installed and running.
Important: The RDP management like configuration and removal is possible from inPilot GUI only. For information on managing the RDPs, refer to the inPilot Online Help.
Important: For Bulkstat, there is no support for distributed model and all the bulkstat input files will be parsed by master inPilot only.
The following figure illustrates the distributed architecture of inPilot.
 
Distributed Architecture of inPilot
 
How RDP works with inPilot
This section describes how the RDP works with the inPilot application.
The RDP parses the raw data or EDR files from one or more GGSNs and populates the database for required reports. The RDP pre-processes the data and then periodically forwards them to the master inPilot through SFTP for report generation.
Important: If the distributed model of inPilot is used, then the SFTP user name and password should be the same as the inPilot Administrator user’s login name and password provided during installation. For information on configuring SFTP details, see the inPilot Online Help documentation.
Each of the RDP and inPilot will be assigned a unique ID during installation and will be used for identification of each RDP along with its gateway and data.
 
inPilot with RDPs in Distributed Model
Each of the registered RDPs will form a new region. RDP region can be a child of the root of the inPilot (NOC) or can be the child of another region. However, all the gateways associated with a RDP will always be the children of RDP region.
Important: Only single inPilot can communicate with an RDP simultaneously.
 
inPilot Deployment
The following figure illustrates how the inPilot reporting server interacts with the gateways and generates the reports.
 
 
End-to-end Component Mapping
The inPilot reporting server collects the EDRs, and bulkstats from the gateways and processes the incoming data files and presents reports on Web-based GUI. The inPilot application can generate reports in Excel and PDF formats, and present them to users on a request basis.
 
System Requirements
This section identifies the minimum system requirements for inPilot.
 
Important: The hardware required for inPilot may vary depending on incoming EDR generation, subscriber count, and number of gateways.
 
One pool with minimal capacity, two disks mirrored for OS only. The remaining disks are to be configured in one single zpool.
Important: The current inPilot release 10.0.x works with StarOS version 9.0.

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