CrossTalk™ provides a complete portfolio of products for network and service assurance, complementing and adding to well known products in the assurance area, such as IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus, Zenulta Zen™, HP TeMIP, HP OpenView and EMC Smarts.

The portfolio is based on a structured architecture, consisting of a core foundation offering based on the CrossTalk Mediation and Mapping Engine that supports the following facilities

• Mediation Services to handle communication with network equipment and systems
• Alarm Event Mapping Services to enrich and augment alarms
• Mapping Extension Plug-Ins to extend the mapping operations available
• Automation of alarm handling through provision of a Perl environment to automatically launch scripts on alarm reception
• GUIs to support user configuration and control of the foundation capabilities
• Integration Services to provide communication with underlying products

A set of applications is provided which overlay on the foundation to extend the base capabilities to include high value solutions for

• Alarm/fault classification in accordance with Operations defined policies
• GIS visualisation of network alarms/faults in real time
• Semi automated alarm handling giving operators the capability to launch recovery scripts dependent on alarms received
• State Management for sophisticated control of out of service equipment that is generating alarms
• Alarm Escalation Management to flag when alarms have not been handled based on sophisticated escalation policies
• Alarm Logging Services to log and report on network alarms
• SNMP ReSynchronisation to recover from loss of communication with SNMP managed equipment
• Alarm Archive Viewer to view historical alarms

Communicating with external equipment could not be easier with a combination of the platform independant CrossTalk™ Mediation Framework and the Mediation Services Toolkit, providing configurable access to many APIs and protocols including TCP, OSS/J, SNMP, ASCII and CORBA.

The Alarm History Player provides the capability to inject historic alarms into a system for testing and training.