After service is provisioned for a subscriber under a given QoS level, the service provider must ensure that the purchased level of service is delivered. In the EMS domain, this process involves the fault and performance management of the provisioned network resources. The EMS plays a key role in maintaining the health of both NEs and transmission facilities. After faults are discovered, the operator must troubleshoot, repair, and restore the network as quickly as possible.
Fault management ensures that service remains available.
It also facilitates the visualization of trends that can indicate periodic or gradual degradation of physical resources. This data can be used to determine whether the service product is appropriately matched to the subscribers' usage characteristics. It can also be used to forecast demand and suggest service upgrades before QoS suffers. It requires proactive monitoring of the network fault, performance, and utilization parameters to preempt any degradation in service quality. Technicians can then use the EMS database and EMS tools to do a pinpoint diagnostic.