Integrating with other Systems – Creating Interface Requirement Specifications

Do you have plans for integrating your OSS with other systems but don’t know where to start? Start by developing an Interface Requirement Specification (IRS) that describes the interface objectives for your developers .

This course provides you with the process and templates for identifying your NBI and mapping data across these interfaces into your OSS. The templates include sample device types for many different styles of network elements and systems.

The course walks you through the creation of an Interface Requirement Specification (IRS) with sections that include

1. Introduction to the interface
2. Capture all Interface descriptions (eg manufacturer, domain, agent type, version, physical interface, management interface) in the NBI Interface Capture Matrix (provided with samples)
3. Capture details about the Interface types (eg alarms, performance, inventory / config, provisioning, admin, etc). [Note that a single device type may have completely independent interfaces for each of the interface types]
   1. Interface protocol (eg REST, SNMP, CORBA, etc)
   2. Connectivity specifications (eg HTTPs, MIBs, IDLs, etc)
   3. Code libraries and associated documentation
   4. Message style – some interfaces use file / log transfers rather than messages, others allow sessions to be established
   5. Format of the messages (eg header, object identifiers, index/counters, message content, framing, timestamps, timeouts, status, etc).
   6. List of message types, definitions, variables and usage / description
4. Managed objects (eg devices, cards, ports, etc)
5. Special interpretations, enrichments, parsing rules, mapping, derivations, thresholds or actions to take with each type of message. [Note that you may even need a description of the network under management, such as topologies, services, naming conventions, etc to explain the interpretation of messages]
6. Classification of OSS objects (eg fields in a database) for the source data to be mapped to
7. Mapping of messages into OSS objects
8. Introduction to TM Forum Open APIs
9. List of violations or exceptions and corresponding descriptions of how to handle them

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