The inPilot is a Web-based application providing a unified reporting interface for diverse data from the Starent Networks’ In-line service and storage applications. This release of inPilot supports only data reported in Event Data Records (EDRs).
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.
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Analyzing the reporting data and enabling the operator to get a full understanding of the performance of the network, enabling operators to optimally configure and plan their network.
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The inPilot application provides comprehensive and consistent set of statistics and customized reports, and report scheduling and distribution from Starent Networks’ ST Series platform / 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 bulk statistics, EDRs data from Starent Networks’ 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.
For more information on using the inPilot application to generate reports, see the inPilot Online Help documentation.
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, 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.
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Monthly Reports: Usage reporting for the past 30-day period (1st day of the month through the last day of the month)
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Traffic Analysis Report: The Traffic Analysis report provides the total usage traffic (including uplink and downlink traffic) details for the following application categories:
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The usage traffic is expressed in terms of megabytes (MB) and percentage (%). The traffic can also be in gigabytes (GB) / kilobytes (KB) / bytes depending on the magnitude.
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Traffic Categorization Report: The Traffic Categorization report provides details of the various protocols and applications on layer 7. This includes protocols using well-known TCP or UDP ports as identified by IANA, VoIP, and streaming protocols including the dynamic identification of RTP, and P2P protocols which often run on ports which can be freely defined (including running on well-known ports).
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Traffic Distribution Report: The Traffic Distribution report provides the summary of total usage traffic and Top N subscriber traffic for all the protocols over a specified time period. The usage traffic is represented in GB/MB/KB/Bytes and packets.
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TopN Subscribers Report: The TopN Subscribers report simply counts the number of bytes per subscriber for different time intervals. It displays the top 10/100/1000 subscribers for each hour (or just for the busy hour) and for each day/week/month/year. This report is displayed for all configured gateways.
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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.
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TopN VCD Subscribers Report: The TopN VCD Subscribers report displays the top N subscribers based on their voice usage (voice duration) for Yahoo, MSN and Skype voice protocols. The summary report displays the voice summary (voice duration) for VoIP category.
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Subscribers Per Protocol Report: The Subscribers Per Protocol report provides an overview of the usage patterns of the entire subscriber population per protocol, for example, how many people are actually using VoIP.
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HTTP EDR based Reports: The inPilot application parses HTTP EDRs and generates the following reports based on the EDRs:
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RAT Classification Report: The RAT Classification report provides the details of total traffic classified according to Radio Access Type (RAT) such as GERAN, UTRAN, WLAN, etc.
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DPI Report: The Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) reports are the canned statistical reports at the gateway level. You can configure the inPilot application to generate the reports for any of the available gateways.
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Bulkstat Report: The Bulkstat report provides details of the processed bulk statistics from any application (PDSN, GGSN, SGSN, and so on) on the managed nodes in a timely manner. You can configure the inPilot application to generate the reports for any of the available gateways.
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KPI Report: The KPI report provides details of the KPIs for each selected schema. You can configure the inPilot application to generate the reports for any of the available gateways.
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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.
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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.
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If there is no data available for a report, the Export to PDF button is disabled.
The inPilot solution consists of two components — a server and a GUI client. The following figure shows a typical organization of the inPilot solution.
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DB Server: This is the standard PostGreSQL 8.3 database server. This is started at the time of application startup.
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Quartz Scheduling Engine: This is the core of the inPilot reporting solution. It is used to schedule different tasks such as parsing of incoming data files, trigger various canned reports on a periodic basis, cleaning up of stored outdated data and files, and so on.
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Generators: These are python based scripts that are used for parsing various CSV files. The files are parsed to an extent where generated files (or data in database) themselves represent meaningful data. This is a very powerful concept introduced for faster processing of information.
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The generators archive the files once they are parsed. In archival, the files are zipped and placed in the configured location.
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Loggers: The inPilot application uses various loggers so that application logs with various severities are made available for debugging purpose.
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The following figure illustrates how the inPilot reporting server interacts with the gateways and generates the reports.
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.
IMPORTANT: The hardware required for inPilot may vary depending on incoming EDR generation, subscriber count, and number of gateways.|
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ZFS is the recommended file system with two ZFS pools.
One pool with minimal capacity, two disks mirrored for OS only. The remaining disks are to be configured in one single zpool. |
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1 * 512MB cache SAS HW RAID controller (optional)
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One pool with minimal capacity, two disks mirrored for OS only. The remaining disks are to be configured in one single zpool.
IMPORTANT: For information on which server to be used for inPilot, contact your local sales representative.