Patent ID: 8108517

Claim:
A platform for a real-time, non-intrusive, transparent monitoring of application-level data activity on a mobile data network so that the activity may be correlated to specific users or aggregated and then reported to an operator, the monitoring platform comprising: a plurality of collectors distributed throughout the mobile data network, each collector corresponding to and being in communication with a corresponding router in said mobile data network to receive data communications from said corresponding router, said each collector inspecting said communications to detect source IP addresses and correlating said communications with phone numbers associated with user mobile devices; a data manager receiving said communications and the correlated phone numbers from a plurality of said collectors, said data manager using a corresponding phone number for each communication to query carrier information associated with said corresponding phone number to determine at least one of a location of a user, demographics of the user, content of the site accessed by the user, a type of application the user is accessing, and a device type the user is using, said data manager analyzing said received communications and said associated carrier information to provide information to satisfy a set of input requirements of a set of defined real-time reports, said real-time reports providing real-time information on aggregated usage of said network correlated to at least one of the location of the user, demographics of the user, content of the site accessed by the user, type of application the user is accessing, and device type the user is using, and said data manager maintaining a database storing said received communications and associated carrier information; a report manager, cooperating with said data manager, to facilitate development and testing of new real-time reports, said report manager receiving operator instructions specifying information to be included in said new real-time reports and causing said data manager to analyze said received communications and said associated carrier information to provide information to satisfy a different set of input requirements of said new real-time reports and to include said new reports in said set of defined real-time reports, wherein said different set of input requirements of said new real-time reports requires a different subset of said received communications and said associated carrier information than required by said set of input requirements of said set of defined real-time reports to provide real-time information on aggregated usage of said network correlated to at least one of the location of the user, demographics of the user, content of the site accessed by the user, type of application the user is accessing, and device type the user is using.