Leading Network Service Provider Improves Operational ...



Overview

Country: United States

Industry: Information Technology

Customer Profile

Atlanta, Georgia–based Cox Communications is a leading network service provider. The company’s nationwide, high-speed broadband network delivers three lines of service: cable TV, telephony, and high-s speed Internet.

Business Situation

Cox needed a way to capture real-time event data generated from devices throughout its network, correlate that data with other information that was stored in several heterogeneous databases, and deliver the combined results to end users—without requiring extensive software development for each new report that was needed.

Solution

Working with Intellinet, Cox built a solution that delivers the information that users need to make better, faster business decisions. Called NetMon, the solution aggregates real-time network data, correlates that data with information in several heterogeneous systems, and provides users with access to reports based on the combined data through a single enterprise portal.

Benefits

■ Improved troubleshooting

■ Better maintenance

■ More efficient use of resources

■ Improved report processing

■ The ability for nontechnical personnel to author and manage reports

| | |“SQL Server Reporting Services makes it far easier to develop reports, manage those reports, and deliver them to the people who need the information.”

Tim Winebarger, Manager, NOC Tools Group, Cox Communications

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| | | |Cox Communications built a business intelligence solution that provides deep insight into the health |

| | | |of its nationwide network and the efficiency with which that infrastructure is managed. Called |

| | | |NetMon, the solution pulls data from several heterogeneous source systems, aggregates and correlates |

| | | |that data, and exposes the combined results through a single enterprise portal. Microsoft SQL Server |

| | | |Reporting Services enhances the value of NetMon, enabling report creation and management to be |

| | | |performed by business analysts instead of software developers. NetMon is helping users at all levels |

| | | |of the company to make better, faster business decisions and is resulting in improved troubleshooting|

| | | |capabilities, better maintenance, more efficient use of resources, and improved report processing. |

| | | | |

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Situation

Cox Communications is the fourth largest network service provider in the United States, with close to 21,000 employees, 6.3 million customers, and U.S.$8 billion in annual revenues. The company offers a range of telecommunications services that include digital video programming, local and long distance telephone services, high-speed Internet access, and commercial voice and data services.

For Cox, it’s not about being the biggest; it’s about being the best. The company is regarded as a leader in its industry, having earned Operator of the Year honors from Communication Engineering and Design Magazine in 2002 and the Cablevision Multichannel News Operator of the Year Award three times in the past 10 years. At the heart of this success is the Cox Network Operations Center (NOC), an Atlanta, Georgia–based facility that continually monitors the company’s nationwide broadband network and works with local resources to keep things running smoothly.

Prior to 2003, NOC personnel had no efficient way to analyze network operations over time. Real-time status updates from devices supporting the company’s telephony, cable TV, and high-speed Internet services are continually fed into NetCool, a centralized network-monitoring solution based on Sybase and UNIX, but those updates are deleted from the system’s in-memory database as soon as events are cleared.

At one time, Cox had attempted to archive network events into a second UNIX database that mirrored the structure of NetCool, but the amount of processing power required to insert 1.7 million new records per day prevented decent responsiveness when running queries. What’s more, in order for the reports to be meaningful, the network events needed to be accompanied by contextual data, such as configuration parameters for the device that generated an alert or the device’s geographic location. Depending on the type of device, this contextual data resides in one of three additional systems, each built upon a different technology platform:

■ Telephony. Contextual data for telephony devices is stored together with event data in Cornerstone Voice, a Microsoft® SQL ServerTM–based data warehouse that business intelligence consultancy and longtime Cox partner Intellinet had helped to build a few years earlier.

■ Cable TV. Contextual data for devices that support the company’s cable TV services is stored in NetMentor, a solution based on Solaris and Oracle.

■ High-speed Internet. Contextual data for devices that support the company’s high-speed Internet services is stored in EdgeHealth, a solution based on Linux and MySQL.

Without the ability to perform historical trending across all of those systems, NOC personnel had little information on which to base business decisions—such as the efficiency of field resources or where to focus maintenance measures. Instead, they were forced to operate in a reactive manner and address problems after they arose. This left fewer resources to work on proactive projects, such as building out the infrastructure to support new services.

In addition, limited visibility into the causes of some problems resulted in the inefficient use of resources. For example, the failure of a fiber node—a key component of the underlying fiber-optic network on which all three Cox lines of service are based—may result in a separate alert for each of the telephony, cable TV, and high-speed Internet systems. Without a way to correlate those events to a single failure, multiple crews often would be dispatched to fix the same problem.

“We’ve always had a wealth of real-time information at our disposal, but our inability to report on it over time was limiting our operational efficiency,” says Tim Winebarger, Manager of the NOC Tools group at Cox Communications.

Solution

Intellinet, a Microsoft Gold Certified Business Intelligence Partner, came to Cox in mid-2002 with its vision for an enterprise reporting infrastructure that would meet all of the company’s needs. Less than six months later, that vision had become a reality. Cox’s new business intelligence solution uses the advanced business intelligence features built into Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to provide the company with deep insight into the health and performance of its network and the efficiency with which it is managed.

Called NetMon, the solution puts all of the information that Cox personnel need to make better business decisions at their fingertips. It captures real-time alert data across all three Cox lines of service, correlates and augments that information with data from other systems, and exposes the combined data—as well as other data sources—through a single enterprise portal.

End users access NetMon reports through an intuitive, Web-based interface, regardless of the mix of data sources that are used to generate a report. The NOC Tools group uses the same Web interface to manage reports—for example, to set permissions for who can view each report and determine the frequency with which preprocessed reports are refreshed. NetMon already has approximately 300 regular users, a number that Winebarger expects to grow into the thousands as additional reports are added to the system.

Building the Solution

NetMon was developed in two phases. Between June and December 2002, Intellinet worked with the NOC Tools group to define requirements and build the solution’s four main components:

■ Preprocessing. This tier captures real-time event data from NetCool and correlates it with information from contextual data sources and two trouble-ticket systems. SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) is used extensively in this tier of the solution, both to extract data from the many heterogeneous source systems and to correlate the data after it is retrieved. The clustered pair of four-processor servers on which DTS runs extracts, transforms, and loads 640 MB of data per day into the data warehouse.

■ Data warehouse. Correlated data is loaded by the preprocessing tier into a data warehouse. Data volumes in the warehouse currently are close to half a terabyte and are growing at the rate of 4.5 gigabytes (GB) per week.

■ OLAP. Through the use of SQL Server Analysis Services, selected information is loaded from the data warehouse into online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes, with the data aggregated and dimensioned in ways that are meaningful to the company’s business. Users access the OLAP cubes using a thin-client OLAP tool provided on the NetMon portal, “slicing and dicing” the information as required to make informed business decisions.

■ Reporting and Presentation. Access to all reports is provided through the NetMon portal’s Web-based interface. Depending on the type of report, clicking a link on the NetMon portal may start the OLAP thin client or display the report directly in a Web browser window.

Although this infrastructure provided access to the information that people required, the NOC Tools group still faced some challenges. Some reports that users needed were too processor-intensive; letting users run them on an ad hoc basis would have placed an unacceptable load on the source systems. In addition, software developers with knowledge of the source systems were needed to develop the reports, and often the developers needed to hard-code queries directly into Web pages. The extra coding required to generate graphical reports made them impractical. Report management was an additional burden, often requiring more coding changes by software developers.

An Integrated Reporting Environment

Cox solved its remaining challenges using SQL Server Reporting Services, which provides the company with a consolidated environment and tool set across all phases of the report life cycle: authoring, management, and delivery. NetMon already has 80 concurrent users, 300 total users, and 30 Reporting Services reports. Cox expects the solution to eventually have more than 2,000 total users and 150–200 Reporting Services reports.

“SQL Server Reporting Services makes it far easier to develop reports, manage those reports, and deliver them to the people who need the information,” says Winebarger. “Adding Reporting Services into NetMon was no trouble at all—it only took a few weeks, and the benefits are huge.”

Designing Reports. In the Reporting Services environment, reports are created using an intuitive visual designer that functions as an add-in to the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system. The tool makes it possible for personnel without any software development skills to create reports that contain both tabular and graphical elements, using a forms-based design environment and simple drag-and-drop operations. For the NOC Tools team, this means that reports now can be created by the group’s business analysts, which frees the group’s developers to focus on other tasks.

“With SQL Server Reporting Services, I can create many reports without having to ask for assistance from a developer,” says Austin Harmon, an Application Support Analyst on the NOC Tools team. “I just point to the data sources, lay out the report, and preview it—all from within one tool. I created my first production-ready Reporting Services report in four hours.”

The team has already created about 30 new Reporting Services reports. Preexisting reports created with Active Server Pages (ASP), of which there are more than 100, are being converted to Reporting Services reports at the rate of three to four per week. In many cases, the team is finding that the increased flexibility provided by Reporting Services enables business analysts to combine several ASP reports into one Reporting Services report, giving end users the freedom to tailor report results in real time by using drop-down boxes and other user-friendly mechanisms.

Managing Reports. For Winebarger and his team, another major benefit of Reporting Services is that the environment facilitates efficient report management. Unlike before, report management tasks like assigning permissions do not require developer assistance. Instead, the team uses a Web-based Reporting Services administrative console to set properties for each report, such as which users are authorized to access the report and any personalization options based on the user’s identity. No extra work was required to identify and authenticate users because Reporting Services integrates seamlessly with Cox’s existing Microsoft Windows NT®–based domain infrastructure.

“Reporting Services provides great separation between report creation and report management,” says Winebarger. “Without any technical know-how, I can easily rename, move, duplicate, or hide a report, or edit its description. Business analysts can concentrate on a report’s content and layout without having to be concerned about the report’s audience.”

Reporting Services also provides flexibility in controlling when reports are processed and the frequency with which they are updated. Through the Reporting Services administrative console, business analysts can specify three options for each report:

■ Real-time. When this option is selected, a report is run against its specified data sources each time a user requests that report.

■ Snapshot. Reports of this type are run automatically at configurable intervals, with the results stored within the Reporting Services data store. When a user accesses the report, Reporting Services pulls the stored report results from its data store and delivers the results to the user.

■ Cached. When a report marked as “cached” is first processed, a copy of the results is stored in the Reporting Services data store. If the report is accessed again before the cached copy expires (time intervals are configurable using the Reporting Services administrative console), the cached copy is retrieved from the Reporting Services data store and delivered to the user. If the cached data has expired, the report is run again and delivered to the user. The new copy of the results is stored in the cache, and the expiration period is reset.

“Cached and snapshot reports greatly improve our ability to manage the load on our back-end systems and have allowed us to deliver reports to end users that in the past would not have been feasible,” says Winebarger. “For example, we wanted to create a particular monthly report. But letting people run that report on an ad hoc basis would have placed an undue load on some source systems. With Reporting Services, we can just specify that report as a snapshot and configure it to update itself with new results at the beginning of every month.”

The Reporting Services shared data source feature also is proving useful in managing reports. With this feature, data sources for multiple reports can be changed by editing a single shared data source object—a capability that greatly improves the manageability of reports as they pass from a development environment to staging and production environments.

Delivering Reports. Today, all Reporting Services reports that Cox has created are accessed by end users through the NetMon portal using a Web browser. One Web server publishes the Reporting Services report catalog to end users, with the reports themselves processed on two other farmed Web servers that also are running Reporting Services. This architecture will let Cox scale its new reporting infrastructure painlessly—the company can just add servers running Reporting Services to the Web server farm when the reporting workload approaches the capacity of the two servers currently in place.

Cox also will be able to integrate its new reporting solution with other line-of-business systems and applications. The interface into all Reporting Services functionality is exposed as a set of XML Web services, which provides Cox with a standards-based interface through which other systems and applications can access NetMon data. Similarly, end users will be able to pull NetMon data directly into desktop applications like Microsoft Office Excel, where it can be easily manipulated for further analysis. Winebarger also plans to investigate using the subscription-based “push” report delivery features of Reporting Services, which make it possible to automatically deliver reports to users at predefined intervals.

Benefits

Through NetMon, the NOC Tools group is providing timely access to the information that personnel at all levels of the company need to make better, faster business decisions. This improved access to information will help Cox Communications to do more with less, making more efficient use of resources and focusing those resources on the issues that have the greatest effect on the largest number of customers.

“NetMon lets us deliver real business intelligence to all types of users through a single portal, regardless of where the data actually resides,” says Winebarger. “People make better business decisions when they have access to the right information, which results in higher service levels and increased operational efficiency. Reporting Services accelerates those benefits by enabling us to deliver that information faster and more cost-effectively.”

Improved Troubleshooting Capabilities

Technical personnel at Cox benefit from an improved ability to isolate issues and prioritize their resolution. They can begin with high-level reports that identify key problem areas, quickly drilling down into detailed data to determine the source of a problem. They can identify those device types that are the most problematic, view alarms that remain unresolved after a specified time period, determine peak usage levels and time periods for specific network devices, and profile network devices by contextual attributes (such as location or device configuration settings).

More Efficient Maintenance

With NetMon, Cox personnel can easily report on how problems were addressed over time and evaluate the ultimate effect that a problem had on system health. But more important, they can see back into historical data that was generated before a problem arose, such as the point at which a device switched over to a redundant subsystem—information that can be used to determine early warning signs and the appropriate preventive actions.

“NetMon lets us easily track the flow of problems from A to Z, which reduces assumptions and finger pointing,” says Winebarger. “And it greatly improves our ability to identify where we need preventive measures. Instead of dispatching multiple trucks in response to a problem, service interruptions can be prevented in their entirety by dispatching a single technician with a screwdriver. Not only will we improve the efficiency with which technical resources are used, but preventing problems from happening in the first place will have a significant positive effect on call center costs.”

More Efficient Use of Resources

In the past, Winebarger gives an example that NOC personnel may spend more than 90 percent of their time reacting to problem situations. The improved operational efficiency and preventive maintenance that NetMon facilitates will reduce the amount of time that personnel spend in a reactive mode, freeing additional time to focus on proactive tasks such as those that will facilitate higher service levels, lower costs, or additional revenues. “NetMon should help us to be 30 to 50 percent more efficient in how we use our limited resources,” says Winebarger. “As a result, we’ll be able to shift a good amount of energy toward new, proactive projects.”

The new solution also will improve productivity for the NOC Tools group. In the past, creating new reports required the skills of developers with knowledge of ASP scripting. With Reporting Services, business analysts can create those same reports as well as newer, more useful ones without the need for developer assistance. “A major benefit of Reporting Services is that I can have business analysts create the reports that end users need, instead of queuing them up to be done by a software developer,” says Winebarger. “This new capability will free an estimated 800 developer-hours per year, which will save us a lot of money because we won’t need to outsource nearly as much development work as we have in the past.”

Improved Report Processing

The caching and snapshot capabilities of Reporting Services provide Cox with several benefits in running reports—both at the infrastructure level and related to the end-user experience. The NOC Tools group now can provide users with access to reports that in the past were too processor intensive to run in real time. Similarly, processing workloads generated by existing ASP reports are decreasing as those reports are converted to Reporting Services and its caching and snapshot features are applied. Processor cycles that are freed will become available for other uses, such as improving query times for reports that demand real-time processing. To end users, the result is faster delivery of all types of reports—both those that are still processed in real time and those that use the caching and snapshot capabilities built into Reporting Services.

Cost-Effectiveness

According to Winebarger, the benefits of NetMon far outweigh the costs. “When Intellinet shared its vision for an integrated business intelligence solution, we knew that it was something we had to do,” he says. “The costs were very reasonable, and the project was affordable within our budget. Requirements have changed and grown over time, but each phase of the project was completed on budget and on schedule—accomplishments that are due largely to the Microsoft business intelligence solution and the skills with which Intellinet helped us apply it to our unique business needs.”

Extensible, Comprehensive, and Scalable Solution

Cox is moving forward aggressively with NetMon, with new reporting requirements coming in from across the organization. Its investment in Microsoft business intelligence technologies leaves the NOC Tools group well positioned to deliver new reports, focusing on meeting the needs of users instead of sourcing data and validating its integrity and timeliness. As usage of NetMon continues to expand, each tier of the solution can be scaled and extended separately to accommodate more users, new data sources, and increased data volumes.

“With the addition of Reporting Services, SQL Server continues to be our choice for new applications and an extensible platform for application consolidation,” says John Hall, Director of Operational System Support for Cox Communications. “Now we can add the solid, scalable reporting infrastructure of Reporting Services to our business intelligence environment, where we have already fully leveraged Data Transformation Services, the SQL Server relational engine, Analysis Services for OLAP, and Data Mining and Notification Services for alert applications.”

System Architecture

As illustrated in Figure 1, the architecture of NetMon consists of four tiers: preprocessing, data warehouse, OLAP, and reporting and presentation. Intellinet chose this design to ensure superior scalability for the solution: Each tier can be scaled up or out separately as required, with minimal impact on the other tiers of the solution.

Preprocessing Tier

The preprocessing tier consists of two Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers running the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Advanced Server operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. Each server has four Intel Xeon 1.6-gigahertz (GHz) processors and 4 GB of RAM. To maximize availability in support of the company’s 24-hour-a day operations, the two servers are configured into an active-active cluster using Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS). “NetMon has been extremely reliable,” says Winebarger. “I can’t recall a single incident of downtime.”

The preprocessing tier continually extracts data from an Oracle staging database that mimics the database structure of NetCool, transforming and correlating that information with other data that it retrieves from the company’s two trouble-ticket systems and three contextual data sources. Data from NetMentor and EdgeHealth is extracted in batch mode a few times per day, and data from Cornerstone Voice is retrieved as needed. At most, a 15-minute window exists between the time that network events are received by NetCool and the point at which they are loaded into the data warehouse.

Intellinet took advantage of SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) in building the complex functionality required to extract data from several heterogeneous source systems, transform and correlate that data, and continually load it into the data warehouse. By building the tier’s complex extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) processes in a modular manner using nested DTS packages, Intellinet has ensured that any changes to source systems will result in the bulk of the code remaining unaffected, with only those DTS packages at the lowest level having to be altered. SQL Server Notification Services immediately notify system administrators by e-mail should an ETL process fail for any reason, such as a source system being offline.

Data Warehouse Tier

Correlated data from the preprocessing tier is stored in the data warehouse, which resides on a pair of Dell PowerEdge 6450/900 servers running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. Each server is configured with two 900-MHz Xeon processors and 2 GB of RAM, with the pair of servers supported by a dedicated network-attached storage (NAS) device. The data warehouse currently contains 460 GB of data but was designed to scale well into the terabyte range. Some tables are already approaching 100 million records, with the database processing 135 transactions per second during peak load periods.

The data warehouse is based on a star schema—a denormalized database design that facilitates the loading of large amounts of data and minimizes report-processing times. Intellinet created stored procedures and applied indexed views to key tables to further improve reporting performance and minimize the load placed on the solution’s presentation and reporting servers.

OLAP Tier

The OLAP tier of NetMon resides on an Intel TIGER4 server running the 64-bit versions of the Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, Enterprise Edition, and SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. The server is configured with 16 GB of RAM and four 64-bit 1.5-GHz, third-generation Intel Itanium (aka “Madison”) processors, each having 6 MB of on-board high-speed cache. In total, this tier of the solution houses 14 OLAP cubes, the largest containing more than 290 million rows. The “voice ports” dimension in one OLAP cube contains more than 5 million members, and the “network devices by type” dimension contains more than 1 million members.

By selecting a 64-bit environment running on an Itanium-based server, Cox avoided the inherent 4-GB virtual address space limitation of 32-bit systems. This enabled the company to install and make efficient use of far more physical memory—a critical system resource for OLAP applications that manipulate large amounts of data. “Upgrading from a 32-bit Analysis Services environment to a 64-bit OLAP environment delivered a significant increase in performance,” says Winebarger.

Adds Hall, “Our adoption of the 64-bit Windows environment has given us tremendous performance overhead, where we may not have been able to scale our solution to the same levels on 32-bit systems. I am just not sure we could have done it without the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000.”

Within the solution, OLAP cubes are built and queried on the same server (a second server is ready in case of a hardware failure). Cubes are updated constantly to minimize latency between the time data is acquired by NetMon and the time it is ready for OLAP reporting. Types of data that are aggregated, dimensioned, and made available through Analysis Services include daily and historical outage facts, response times, and information on network topology. Like Reporting Services reports, OLAP reports are accessed through the main NetMon portal.

Presentation and Reporting Tier

The presentation and reporting tier consists of three Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers running Windows 2000 Server with Internet Information Services 5.0 (the Web server built into Windows 2000 Server), SQL Server Reporting Services, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Each server is configured with two 2-GHz Intel Xeon processors and 2 GB of RAM. One Web server delivers all nonreport Web pages for NetMon, including links to both the OLAP reports and Reporting Services reports. In the case of Analysis Services reports, users interact with the data OLAP cubes using TARGIT 2K3 AnalysisNET, a customized thin-client OLAP front end from TARGIT A/S.

Here’s how the presentation and reporting tier interacts with the rest of the solution in delivering a report to a user:

■ The Reporting Services report catalog and all report definitions are stored on the data warehouse tier (although they could reside on a different server). The instance of Reporting Services running on the single portal server authenticates the user, queries the Reporting Services catalog, and displays those reports that the user is authorized to access.

■ When the user clicks a specific report, the request is passed from the main portal server to one of the two reporting servers, which are stateless. Reporting Services retrieves the report definition from the report catalog. Report definitions are stored using an XML-based Report Definition Language (RDL) schema.

■ Based on the report type (real-time, snapshot, or cached), Reporting Services executes the report against the data warehouse and other back-end systems, returns a snapshot, or checks for and returns an unexpired cached copy. If the copy in the cache has expired, the report is run again, and a new copy is cached. Cached and snapshot reports are stored in the Reporting Services data store as a binary large object (BLOB) and rendered as HTML by Reporting Services.

To Winebarger, the fact that report definitions are published and stored using RDL presents some attractive options. “RDL turns Reporting Services into a reporting platform that we can develop upon,” he says. “In the past, everyone programmed directly against back-end systems. Now we have a robust interface into data that we can use both to deliver reports and to expose that report data to other systems.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows ServerTM operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

‌windowsserversystem/

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| |Software and Services

Products

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

Microsoft SQL Server 2000

Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server

− Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition |Hardware

■ Two Dell PowerEdge 6650 four-processor servers

■ Two Dell PowerEdge 6450 two-processor servers

■ One Intel TIGER4 64-bit “Madison” four-processor server

■ Three Dell PowerEdge 6650 two-processor servers

Partner

■ Intellinet | |

“Our adoption of the 64-bit Windows environment has given us tremendous performance overhead, where we may not have been able to scale our solution to the same levels on 32-bit systems. I am just not sure we could have done it without the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000.”

John Hall, Director, Operational System Support, Cox Communications

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“With the addition of Reporting Services, SQL Server continues to be our choice for new applications and an extensible platform for application consolidation. Now we can add the solid, scalable reporting infrastructure of Reporting Services to our business intelligence environment, where we have already fully leveraged Data Transformation Services, the SQL Server relational engine, Analysis Services for OLAP, and Data Mining and Notification Services for alert applications.”

John Hall, Director, Operational System Support, Cox Communications

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© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows NT, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Document published October 2003 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Intellinet products and services, visit the Web site at:

For more information about Cox Communications products and services, visit the Web site at:

Figure 1 – Cox’s new business intelligence solution provides employees at all levels of the company with deep insight into the health and performance of its network and the efficiency with which it is managed.

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“NetMon lets us easily track the flow of problems from A to Z, which reduces assumptions and finger pointing. And it greatly improves our ability to identify where we need preventive measures.”

Tim Winebarger, Manager, NOC Tools Group, Cox Communications

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“With SQL Server Reporting Services, I can create many reports without having to ask for assistance from a developer. I just point to the data sources, lay out the report, and preview it—all from within one tool. I created my first Reporting Services report in four hours.”

)*Austin Harmon, Application Support Analyst, NOC Tools Group, Cox Communications

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Network Service Provider Improves Operational Efficiency with Comprehensive Business Intelligence Solution

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