Agama launches fourth generation of its DTV monitoring solution at IP&TV World Forum
March 21, 2011
Agama Technologies, the quality assurance expert, has announced the launch of version 4.0 of the Agama DTV Monitoring Solution for cable, DTH and IPTV operators. Visitors to Agama’s stand 179 at IP&TV World Forum will be able to see live demonstrations of v4.0, which includes a system-wide remake of the GUI, and a foundation restructure to strongly increase the solution’s openness and scalability.
The Agama DTV Monitoring Solution is a complete and modular end-to-end QA solution for cable, IPTV and DTH operators. With tailored components for head-end, delivery network, and in-home monitoring, the Agama solution gives both real-time and historical understanding of the actual service quality from inside the head-end to each individual subscriber, creating a foundation for operational excellence in the TV delivery. With version 4.0, Agama further strengthens the operators’ possibilities to achieve superior quality of service and customer satisfaction, reduced operational expenses and increased revenues in their TV operations.
Areas of particular focus for this release have been to reinforce the solution’s openness and interoperability. Based on its now well-proven process, Agama continues to extend the collaboration with leading STB vendors, and today offers the market’s widest coverage in pre-integrations of embedded monitoring clients with tens of different STB models supported. With the same intent, the integration APIs are continuously extended and refined, increasing the potential to integrate with different kinds of OSS and BSS, such as Customer Care systems or technical test and diagnostics tools.
Another development within the same field is in v4.0 taken with the new open API infrastructure of Agama’s renowned Embedded Monitoring Solution for technical last-mile and in-home service monitoring. This new possibility enables the solution to communicate with e.g. STBs, residential gateways and DSL modems, through a wide range of protocols, including SNMP, TR-069 and proprietary protocols. Measurements and metrics are collected into the Agama solution with preserved feature set in real-time presentation, alarm handling and reports possibilities.
Scalability and performance of the Embedded Monitoring Solution is additionally enhanced, supporting the largest IPTV and Cable operator installations. The overall capacity is drastically increased – a doubling per physical server compared to the previous generation – and together with the improved total performance, the result is that several millions of end devices can be seamlessly supported in the solution. The head-end and network monitoring probe, the Agama Analyzer, also has increased capacity, supporting in-depth monitoring of up to 500 simultaneous services in real-time.
“For operators, both openness and scalability are of great importance, and we believe that it will be even more so in the coming years as the DTV world evolves,” says Johan Görsjö, Director of Product Management, Agama Technologies. “Version 4.0 of Agama’s DTV Monitoring Solution provides that in a solid quality assurance platform.”
At first glance, the most apparent improvement for the user is the complete makeover of the Graphical User Interface throughout the solution. A streamlined and more efficient navigation, together with a fully new look and feel, creates an enhanced workflow and speeds up the day-to-day use.
“We’re proud to launch the fourth generation of our solution at IP&TV World Forum in London,” Görsjö continues. “We have worked hard and in close collaboration with our customers to ensure that v4.0 provides them the quality assurance foundation to continuously improve their service quality and lower costs, today and in the future, regardless of the DTV platform used.”
Other new products and feature improvements in v4.0 of the Agama DTV Monitoring Solution include;
– A complete web based Customer Care user interface, specially designed for first line support personnel, allowing them to immediately shorten call times and enhance problem resolution using the pre-processed QoE and QoS data from the Agama Embedded Monitoring Solution.
– The Agama Advanced Alarm Architecture is extended with support for handling real-time alarms generated from thousands of concurrent STB groups, representing e.g. each edge QAM, DSLAM or similar network structures. This enables the operator organization to get unprecedented insight in where problems occur, their impact, and how to resolve the situation in the most efficient and structured way.
– With the highest capacity in the industry, the extensively enhanced template based monitoring functionalities in the Agama Analyzer monitoring probe enables verification on a full gigabit of transport streams in a single server, allowing operators to continuously verify services, bitrates and PID compliance. The Agama Analyzer now also offers unique support for monitoring of transport streams embedded in T2MI packets as used in DVB-T2 systems.