MUR Changes in Release 14.0

This chapter identifies features and functionality added to, modified for, or deprecated from 14.0 MUR software releases.

Topics covered in this chapter are:

IMPORTANT:

Enhancements to SNMP MIB in release 14.0 are located in the SNMP MIB Changes chapter.

MUR Feature Changes as of April 01, 2013

This section provides information on MUR feature changes in release 14.0.

IMPORTANT:

The changes identified in this section pertain to the MUR software release slated for April 01, 2013. For more information on these changes, refer to the Mobility Unified Reporting System Installation and Administration Guide dated April 01, 2013.

New MUR Features

This section identifies new MUR features available in release 14.0.

Periodic Synchronization of Master MUR and RDPs

This feature is implemented to sync the metadata from Master MUR to the newly added RDPs. After the installation of master MUR, all the configurations done through System menu in the MUR GUI will be synchronized periodically to the newly added RDPs.

Modified MUR Features

This section identifies MUR features modified in release 14.0. There are two kinds of modified features: enhancements and behavior changes. Enhancements are feature changes based on customer change requests. Behavior changes are feature changes that modify an existing behavior and may result from software error corrections (bug fixes).

Bulkstatistic Parsing Messages Hogging Audit Log - Behavior Change

Previous Behavior: Earlier, the bulkstatistic parsing completed logs were hogging audit log on the MUR GUI.

New Behavior: Bulkstatistic parsing entries are no longer maintained in the audit log. The audit logs will strictly be used to track only administrator configuration changes like user management modifications. A separate log is maintained to report critical alerts of backend servers.

On Demand Parsing - Behavior Change

Previous Behavior: On demand parsing is a concept of parsing historical bulk statistic (BS) files where .zip is a rear option in Linux environment.

New Behavior: MUR accepts .tar and .tar.gz which are common options for uploading BS files in the Linux environment. Users can now specify a bunch of BS files (packaged in .zip or .tar or .tar.gz) for a selected gateway. Note that files other than these formats are not accepted.

Support for Gateway / Region Level Excel Reports - Behavior Change

Previous Behavior: There was only NOC level implementation for getting the excel reports.

New Behavior: Now, the excel reports can be generated based on the selected NOC, gateway or region (RDP) level.

MUR Feature Changes as of November 07, 2012

This section provides information on MUR feature changes in release 14.0.

IMPORTANT:

For more information regarding features in this section, refer to the Mobility Unified Reporting System Installation and Administration Guide for this release.

New MUR Features

This section identifies new MUR features available in release 14.0.

Database Maintenance for Tethering Detection

To populate the correct database of OS-Signature, UA, and TAC, user should be more cautious about the following configurations:

  • Correct TACs for USB Dongle and Smartphone need to be updated in MUR through System menu
  • proper threshold value

For seamless tethering analysis and detection, users are recommended to create and maintain blacklist file and whitelist file for UA and OS-Signatures. It is to be noted that the entries from whitelist file will always be added to the final UA-DB and OS-DB, and those in the blacklist file will be excluded from these DBs before pushing the data to ASR5K. The user can add/modify/delete entries from blacklist / whitelist file either through the GUI or using a script load_tethering_data.sh packaged with MUR in the <MUR_Install_Dir>/starbi/bin/ directory.

Favorites Support for DPI

Similar to bulkstat and KPI favorites, user should first create the favorites with the help of existing filter panel. Storing this favorite will store all related filters which can be viewed under "Favourites" tab.

User can select the respective favorites from a drop-down menu provided in the filter panel. On selecting the favorite from drop-down menu, the filter will get populated and on clicking "show report" button, the corresponding report will be fetched.

Support of TAC reporting in MUR in CDMA Environment

For TAC reporting, currently bearer 3gpp-imei attribute in EDR is used. However, this is only applicable for GGSN/P-GW. For CDMA environment (HA/PDSN), ESN or MEID attributes in EDR is used. Gateway Attribute mappings for these new attributes have been added. Currently, MEID attribute is not supported from ECS side. Hence, a dummy attribute sn-3gpp2-meid has been added. MUR Parser will check all three fields in flow and http EDRs viz. bearer-3gpp imei, sn-3gpp2-esn and sn-3gpp2-meid. Whichever of these fields is present and has a valid TAC information, will be picked up and used. For CDMA TAC reporting, operator can create his own Device Group and map all relevant CDMA TAC IDs to those, or he can use any existing Device Group. CDMA TAC IDs come in hexadecimal format in EDRs.

Modified MUR Features

This section identifies MUR features modified in release 14.0. There are two kinds of modified features: enhancements and behavior changes. Enhancements are feature changes based on customer change requests. Behavior changes are feature changes that modify an existing behavior and may result from software error corrections (bug fixes).

Configuration Support for Background Task for BS/KPI - Behavior Change

Previous Behavior: There were hard coded logic whether a bulkstat report should be shown in the browser interface in real-time or should be processed in background and provide the report for download.

New Behavior: Now the logic for background/real-time report generation is customizable. In the MUR OLH, there is a left tab in the Admin main tab called Browser where the end-user can customize the behavior.

HTTP Group Representation and Storage Method - Behavior Change

Previous Behavior: HTTP host names were stored/displayed as is.

New Behavior: HTTP host names are grouped as per configured groups. While displaying reports only groups will be shown. If there is any unmapped host name it will be displayed in other/unclassified group.

MUR Feature Changes as of June 29, 2012

This section provides information on MUR feature changes in release 14.0.

IMPORTANT:

For more information regarding features in this section, refer to the Mobility Unified Reporting System Installation and Administration Guide for this release.

New MUR Features

This section identifies new MUR features available in release 14.0.

Alarm Support for RDP

In this release, Unprocessed file alarms will be available for RDP as well. Whenever the number of files exceeds the threshold in the SQL directory path on the RDP, then this alarm will be raised.

SFTP alarms will also be available for RDP whenever a SFTP failure occurs during file transfer from RDP to Master.

For information on the alarms supported, see the SNMP MIB Reference chapter.

Bulkstatistics Background Task Configurations

In this release, MUR allows users to configure these parameters “Wait Time” and “Data Size Check” through the GUI to enable the configuration associated with this bulkstat background task.

It is recommended to enable the background functionality for bulkstats and keep 30 seconds as default value for the same.

For more information on this feature, see the Mobility Unified Reporting System Online Help documentation.

Bulkstatistics Enhancements

MUR now supports reporting for some additional Firewall bulk statistic counters grouped under Context schema, and also some additional MVG and SGSN schema counters.

HTTPS Implementation in MUR

In Release 14.0, MUR is SSL enabled by enabling the enhanced security HTTPS apache server. There are some changes to the installer in which user will be asked for HTTP and HTTPS port. User will also be asked whether he wants to use Cisco SSL certificate or his own custom SSL certificate.

The user can identify to either use the Cisco SSL certificate or the customer's own custom SSL certificate. If the user selects the custom SSL certificate and key, then both the key and the certificate will be copied to the starbi directory.

After the installation, user can access MUR using either http://<host>:<port> or https://<host>:<port> depending on how MUR was configured during installation.

In RDP to MASTER synchronization, either HTTP or HTTPS will be used. It again depends on the choices the user made during the installation process.

For more information on this feature, see the Mobility Unified Reporting System Overview chapter in the Mobility Unified Reporting System Installation and Administration Guide.

KPI Canned Reports

The user can configure any KPI for canned reports. The canned reports will be pre-calculated and populated in DB at the end of each day. These reports will be available for selection on MUR dashboard and displayed at hourly granularity at the gateway level.

LDAP Authentication in MUR

Prior to Release 14.0, MUR authenticates users against the MUR local DB information. In this release, users can be authenticated against the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory.

For more information on this feature, see the Mobility Unified Reporting System Overview chapter in the Mobility Unified Reporting System Installation and Administration Guide.

MUR Clustering Support for HA

Whenever the machine or MUR process gets crashed/stopped, there are chances of loss of communication between internal and external entities. To avoid downtime and ensure continuous availability of MUR application, High Availability Support using Veritas Clustering has been provided. Using Veritas Cluster, there will be two machines configured to run MUR application. In case of machine failure, MUR Server will failover (move on to) from the current machine (Active Node) to another machine (called Passive node in Cluster terminology) and that node will handle further processing of data. Operator will not be aware of this failover except that he will be asked to re-login on MUR UI after failover. A floating IP (shared IP), which is common to both the nodes, will be used for accessing MUR GUI. High Availability is supported for both standalone as well as Distributed architecture of MUR. So in case of Distributed Architecture, there will be extra nodes for MASTER and each RDP to support failover mechanism.

For more information on this feature, see the Mobility Unified Reporting System Overview and Mobility Unified Reporting System Clustering Support for High Availability chapters in the Mobility Unified Reporting System Installation and Administration Guide.

Scalability Enhancements in MUR

MUR incorporates performance improvements (software) to scale to higher ASR 5000 data throughput ranges. The performance improvements are measured in terms of rate at which compressed EDR files are parsed by MUR file parsers without leaving any files pending (or unparsed). With these software optimizations on UCS 460 M2, the recommended limit per MUR server is equivalent of 10 Gbps data traffic (which is equivalent to 130K edrs/sec).

Subscriber Data Storing and Reporting

MUR will now support 'Offline search only' mode. In this mode, MUR will not parse the incoming EDR data and no GUI reports will be available. 'Offline search only' MUR will move files directly to archive directory. It will be organized daily in this location. To switch to this mode, after installation, Go to System-->ConfigParameters and change paramvalue of OFFLINE_MODE to True.

It is recommended for OFFLINE_MODE MUR to use more number of processes. The maximum number of processes is 30 per reporting type (total 60) considering a 64 core UCS machine.

Modified MUR Features

This section identifies MUR features modified in release 14.0. There are two kinds of modified features: enhancements and behavior changes. Enhancements are feature changes based on customer change requests. Behavior changes are feature changes that modify an existing behavior and may result from software error corrections (bug fixes).

Consolidated Video Reports in MUR - Behavior Change

Previous Behavior: Video data in DPI traffic analysis and traffic distribution was calculated from flow EDR data only.

New Behavior: Video data in DPI traffic analysis and traffic distribution is calculated from the aggregation of both flow EDR data and also the HTTP data by evaluating the content type group of HTTP data.

MUR will show consolidated video report under Traffic Analysis and Traffic distribution report when the user select reports by 'Category' and Category 'Video' in DPI tab available in MUR GUI. These consolidated reports will show combined Video data from HTTP EDRs as well as flow EDRs.

Disable Session Reporting

The session reports will no longer be available in the 14.0 MUR GUI. If the user has already scheduled topN search for a particular session in the earlier MUR setup and when MUR is upgraded to 14.0, then it is expected that the user deletes the associated entries manually.

Session reporting feature has been introduced in 12.2 release of MUR 12.2 releases but based on internal performance testing it is observed that MUR (uniformly on all the platforms) is not scaling with huge session data and session reporting will no longer be present in 14.0 MUR release.

Subscriber Reporting - Behavior Change

Previous Behavior: Subscriber Hits, TopN Subscriber protocol distribution and TopN VCD distribution subscriber reports were displayed based on Protocol.

New Behavior: MUR now maintains subscribers' data per category (i.e. group of protocols) instead of per protocol. Hence, Subscriber Hits will show Hit count per Category. Similarly, TopN subscriber Category-wise distribution will be shown. And TopN VCD report per VOIP category will be shown.