Initially, SIP3 was created by engineers, specifically for engineers. However, its applications have significantly expanded, encompassing various new use cases beyond the initial intent. We previously explored how SIP3 can enhance the customer service experience. In this article, we will uncover several scenarios embedded within SIP3 that specifically benefit technical teams responsible for managing and maintaining Voice over IP (VoIP) and Real-Time Communications (RTC) infrastructures.
This article will be valuable to executives and engineers working for communication service providers, trunk connectivity operators, wholesale traffic carriers, 4G/5G providers utilizing IMS infrastructure, Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers, cloud-based communication providers, contact centers, and manufacturers and integrators of VoIP and RTC solutions.
Today, SIP3 offers engineering teams of communication service providers an extensive set of tools designed to enhance their capabilities and optimize the valuable time of both the company and its employees.
The first significant scenario is improving the speed of handling support tickets.
Engineering teams still need to address tickets received from customer support departments as well as from partner engineering teams responsible for traffic processing. For companies engaged not only in providing services but also in their own product development, SIP3 technology also streamlines handling requests from development teams. SIP3 offers convenience and accelerated analysis of complex scenarios, which becomes especially crucial during infrastructure degradation, outages, and other critical incidents.
We've previously discussed how SIP3 helps enhance the efficiency of customer service departments. Specifically, it reduces the number of tickets escalated to engineering teams. Besides decreasing the volume, SIP3 also improves the quality of the tickets—making them clearer and better structured. This significantly reduces unproductive tasks for highly skilled engineers, whose time is valuable to the company. In one implementation, SIP3 successfully reduced the turnaround time for ticket escalations from customer service to engineering from two days down to zero, enabling all tickets to be resolved within the same day.
In one SIP3 implementation case, a clear improvement in engineer productivity was documented within the SIP trunk provisioning department of a mobile and fixed-line operator. Previously, investigating a single customer issue typically required around 2 hours, as engineers had to manually search traffic information in application logs and analyze PCAP files to reconstruct the service sequence. After implementing SIP3, the same process now takes just 2 minutes and has become a pleasant experience. As a result, team members are now able to dedicate more time and attention to architectural planning and infrastructure development.
The second important scenario is observability.
The term "observability" emerged in the industry alongside the growing popularity of distributed cloud computing, cloud-native services, and the microservices paradigm. VoIP and RTC infrastructures are inherently distributed and often utilize redundancy with algorithms designed for automatic failover of degraded elements and capacity scaling. As a result, tasks related to monitoring and management have become increasingly complex.
Nowadays, the challenge is intensified by the dynamic deployment of infrastructure elements, which are continuously reconfigured according to workloads. Engineering and expert teams, regardless of their expertise, face difficulties managing numerous metrics from multiple sources and assembling a comprehensive picture.
SIP3 helps address this challenge by consolidating data on the technical handling of each individual call at every stage of service delivery. It correlates service interactions into transaction chains and stores service performance metrics in the form of time series data.
The consolidated and highly detailed metrics, along with visual interaction schemes, allow teams to organize information into video walls, detailed dashboards, and comprehensive reports. This ensures service and infrastructure management centers have real-time and historical insights—enabling a clear view of current statuses, trends, and dependencies.
In one SIP3 implementation, an operational response team benefited significantly from a dashboard that included a key metric: ACD (Average Call Duration). By closely monitoring the real-time ACD graph, teams can quickly identify decreases in call activity across the infrastructure or within specific traffic directions. Notably, even if all network elements and communication channels appear operational—“all green” on your infrastructure—situations may still arise where the ACD drops, resulting in financial losses. For instance, a partner might experience a sudden outage, allowing your team to promptly react and coordinate a resolution. Another scenario might involve a service node silently rejecting service requests without generating explicit alarms. A third example could be new security settings causing one-way audio issues, leading customers to prematurely end calls.
Managed voice traffic effectively equates to revenue for communication operators. By actively monitoring ACD, you ensure the financial health of your business and strengthen customer loyalty.
Leveraging machine data processing tools to track trends and anomalies across various technical metrics significantly expands the capabilities of engineering teams. We'll explore this aspect in more detail in dedicated publications to avoid turning each article into a book.
Collectively, these capabilities enable server and network operations centers to respond swiftly to emerging issues, adopting proactive and preventive operational models to reduce or eliminate outages.
In future articles, we'll also cover automated processing of large datasets generated by SIP3, based on the collected information about VoIP/RTC infrastructure services. Additionally, we plan to publish insights on automated responses to changes in service metrics—for instance, how an increase in call volume or duration can trigger automatic deployment of additional traffic-processing nodes, while a decrease in productive traffic could lead to automatically scaling down allocated computing resources.
Everything SIP3 does reinforces several fundamental statements:
- Improving service availability,
leading directly to enhanced customer loyalty and increased business profitability. - Reducing infrastructure load and support team expenses,
thereby boosting commercial efficiency. - Increasing manageability and scalability
of service infrastructure, reducing risks, and ultimately enhancing business valuation.
From a technical perspective, it's important to highlight that SIP3 operates at the service layer – the 7th level of the OSI model, for those who find this detail valuable. Factors related to applications, IP availability, and other infrastructure aspects serve as sources that enrich information about how services were delivered. Additionally, SIP3 can integrate Charging and Call Data Records (CDRs) for detailed transaction analysis of delivered services. For applications, including WebRTC clients, there is also the capability to enrich service scenario descriptions with numerical quality indicators.
Notably, SIP3 provides its clients with traces of technological transactions executed across distributed infrastructures handling customer communications and service nodes. Within the industry, the term "traces" is widely used, often within the context of Application Performance Monitoring (APM). However, when discussing communication traffic processing infrastructures, "traces" focus more on interactions among communication participants, rather than on analyzing individual components.
SIP3 technology enables the deployment of solutions at various scales – some features are ready "out of the box," requiring minimal integration, while others may need a detailed examination of infrastructure and fine-tuning. The SIP3 team always welcomes partnerships, is prepared to train internal teams within the customer’s organization, and can also deliver not just software but comprehensive integration projects. System integrators experienced in building VoIP/RTC infrastructures often play a significant role, although internal engineering teams within client companies regularly tackle integration tasks as well.
Architecturally, it’s important to highlight that the modular design of SIP3 makes it scalable to virtually any traffic volume and across any distributed infrastructure. Existing deployments among our various clients employ diverse scenarios for automatic scaling and deployment. SIP3 integrates seamlessly with AWS infrastructure, scaling via Terraform and Ansible. It is also actively used within Kubernetes-managed private ecosystems. Service providers handling massive traffic volumes still frequently rely on traditional hardware servers and fiber channel traffic mirroring.
A special mention goes to SIP3-based solutions designed to combat attacks targeting RTC/VoIP infrastructure, as well as solutions aimed at detecting and preventing fraud, robocalls, SIM-boxes, and other common challenges faced by communication service providers. We will discuss these topics in greater detail in upcoming publications.
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