1. Release Notes
  2. Introduction

1 Introduction

The Oracle Communications Session Monitor Release Notes provide information about new features, enhancements, and changed functionality in Release 6.0.

Session Monitor Supported Hardware

The products within the Oracle Communications Session Monitor suite are supported on Oracle, Sun, and HP systems.

The following table lists the hardware supported for Oracle systems.

Table 1-1 Supported Hardware for Oracle systems

Hardware Supported Configurations
Server The following severs are supported:
  • Oracle Server X9-2
  • Oracle Server X9-2L
  • Oracle Server X8-2
  • Oracle Server X7-2
  • Oracle Server X6-2
  • Oracle Server X6-2L
Network Adapter The following adapters are supported:
  • Oracle Quad Port 10GBase-T Adapter

The following table lists the hardware supported for HP systems.

Table 1-2 Supported Hardware for HP Systems

Component Requirement
Server The following servers are supported:
  • HP DL580 G9
  • HP DL380 G9
  • HP DL380p G8
  • HP DL580 G7
Network Adapter The following network adapter s are supported:
  • HP NC365T PCIe Quad Port Gigabit Server Adapter
  • HP NC364T PCIe Quad Port Gigabit Server Adapter
  • HP Ethernet 1Gb 4-port 366FLR Adapter
Driver/Chipsets The following drivers/chipsets are supported:
  • e1000 (82540, 82545, 82546)
  • e1000e (82571, 82574, 82583, ICH8..ICH10, PCH..PCH2)
  • igb (82575, 82576, 82580, I210, I211, I350, I354, DH89xx)
  • ixgbe (82598, 82599, X540, X550)
  • enic
  • i40e
  • Mellanox (mlx4, mlx5)

Hardware Requirements for Production Systems

For production systems, Oracle recommends completing a detailed sizing and traffic profile analysis excercise, please contact your sales representative. Higher performance hardware may be required, for example, in cases with:

  • High levels of monitored traffic
  • High numbers of concurrent users
  • High volumes of historical information

On the Mediation Engine machines, Oracle recommends using a RAID-10 array for the operating system and the database. A separate RAID-5 array is recommended for storing long-term data.

Hardware Requirements for Demonstration Systems

For development or demonstrations systems with little network traffic, the following table lists the minimum requirements to install any of the Session Monitor machine types.

Table 1-3 Hardware Requirements for Demonstration Systems

Component Minimum Requirement
Processor 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon processor, 64-bit with 8 processing threads
Memory 8 GB RAM
Disk Space 80 GB storage on a hardware RAID controller
Ports 2 Ethernet ports

Session Monitor Virtualization Support

This section describes the software and hardware requirements for Session Monitor virtualization.

Hypervisor Support

The following hypervisors are supported:

  • Oracle VM version 3.4
  • VMware vSphere ESXI 8.0 VM
  • VMware vSphere ESXI 7.0 VM
  • Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Virtual Machine Requirements

The following table lists the minimum requirements for the virtual machines.

Table 1-4 Hardware Requirements for Virtual Machines

Component Requirement
Processor 8 vCPUs
Memory 8 GB RAM
Disk Space 80 GB
NIC Card 1 Gbps vNIC

Host Machine Requirements

The physical machine that hosts the virtual machines should contain at a minimum the hardware resources that are required to host all the virtual machines, in addition to the hardware that is required for the hypervisor.

Session Monitor Cloud Deployment

The following minimum shapes supported are as follows. For more information, see the Session Monitor Installation Guide.

  • OCI Cloud : VM Standard 2.8
  • Azure: Standard F8s
  • AWS : c4.4xlarge

Session Monitor Operating System Requirements

Oracle Communications Sessions Monitor is offered as a set of Linux applications. The latest version of Session Monitor Release 6.0 has been tested, benchmarked and certified on the Oracle Linux platform as mentioned in the table below.

Oracle Linux is binary compatible with the RHEL Kernel, and Session Monitor has been tested with Oracle Linux Kernel as mentioned in the table below. Customers who want to use Session Monitor with RHEL are encouraged to install and test Session Monitor on the version of RHEL compatible with supported Oracle Linux version.

In this case, performance and capacity characteristics may vary from those tested while running Session Monitor on Oracle Linux. When Session Monitor is deployed on RHEL, Oracle continues to support Session Monitor when installed on the base RHEL without any customizations.

In case of issues where Oracle Support determines to be related to RHEL, the customer will be directed to work with RedHat support organization for issue resolution.

The following table lists the supported operating systems for running Session Monitor.

Table 1-5 Supported Operating Systems

Product Version Notes
Oracle Linux 8 x86-64 (64 bit) Version 8.10 (with Oracle UE Kernel for Linux) By default Oracle Linux installs Kernel 5.

Oracle recommends that the latest Unbreakable Enterprise (UE) Kernel 5 is installed.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Version 8 See clarification above.

Note:

  • You must configure a network device when installing Oracle Linux 8.
  • If required, update the DPDK drivers.

Session Monitor Connectivity

Following are Session Monitor connectivity details:

  • One Aggregation Engine (Operations Monitor's Mediation Engine Connector feature): Supports up to 64 Mediation Engines
  • One Mediation Engine (Operations Monitor, Control Plane Monitor): Supports up to
    • Native-Only Probes:
      • Media+Sig ; Signalling-Only: 128
      • Packet Inspector: 16
    • Embedded-Only Probes (Session Border Controller as a probe):
      • < 500 parallel calls per Session Border Controller: 1k (might require some manual tweaking, unlimit open files)
      • >= 500 parallel calls per Session Border Controller: 128
  • Mixture of SBC and native probes: 128 (individual limits still apply)
  • One Probe (Operations Monitor, Control Plane Monitor) or Session Border Controller-probe can be connected to up to:
    • Probe: 2 Mediation Engines
    • SBC: 8 Mediation Engines
  • One Mediation Engine (Operations Monitor, Control Plane Monitor): Connected to up to 1 Aggregation Engine

Session Monitor Software Requirements

The table lists the supported client browsers:

Table 1-6 Supported Client Browsers

Browser Version
Mozilla Firefox 135.0 or higher
Apple Safari 18.1 or higher version (19619.2.8.111.5, 19619)
Google Chrome 132.0.6834.160 or later versions
Opera 116.0.5366.71 or later versions
Microsoft Edge 132.0.2957.140 or higher

Compatibility Matrix for Session Monitor

The following products can be configured with Session Monitor:
Product Name Version
DPDK 23.11.2
SP-Session Border Controller SCZ 9.3.0 GA

Works with Operations Monitor and Enterprise Operations Monitor

E-Session Border Controller S-Cz 9.3.0

Works with Operations Monitor and Enterprise Operations Monitor
Enterprise Communications Broker PCZ 4.2.0 GA

Session Border Controller Supported Versions

The table lists supported Session Border Controller (SBC) versions.

Table 1-7 Supported Session Border Controller Versions

Product Versions
Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC)
  • S-Cz9.3.0
  • S-Cz9.2.0
  • S-Cz9.1.0
  • S-Cz9.0.0
  • S-Cz8.4.0
  • S-Cz8.3.0
  • S-Cz8.2.0
  • E-Cz8.1.0
  • E-Cz8.0.0
  • E-Cz7.5.0
  • E-Cz7.4.0
  • E-Cz7.3.0
Session Border Controller (SBC)
  • S-Cz9.3.0
  • S-Cz9.2.0
  • S-Cz9.1.0
  • S-Cz9.0.0
  • S-Cz8.4.0
  • S-Cz8.3.0
  • S-Cz8.2.0
  • S-Cz8.1.0
  • S-Cz8.0.0
  • S-Cz7.5.0
  • S-Cz7.4.0
  • S-Cz7.3.0

Database Support

The following databases are supported by Session Monitor.

MySQL Commercial Edition

Caution:

Starting with Session Monitor Release 6.0, MySQL Database and MySQL Connector is shipped with the new Session-Monitor-6.0.0.0.0.zip bundle and is automatically installed as part of the new installation/upgrade procedure. Separate installation is not required.
This release is compatible with the following versions of MySQL Commercial Edition:
  • MySQL 8.4.4
  • MySQL Connector 8.4.0

Session Monitor System Architecture

The Session Monitor system works by capturing the traffic from your network, correlating it in real-time, and storing it in indexed formats so that they are available for the various reports offered by the web interface.

The Session Monitor system architecture has three layers:

  • Probe layer: This layer is responsible for capturing the traffic from your network and performing the Media Quality analysis. The probes send meta-data for each of the signaling messages to the Mediation Engine layer and analyze the RTP streams locally, sending the results of this analysis to the Mediation Engine layer.
  • Mediation Engine layer: This layer is responsible for understanding in real-time the traffic received, correlating it and storing it for future reference. This layer is also responsible for measuring, managing, and storing the KPIs. In the common case, there is one Mediation Engine per geographical site. It is possible, however, to have the probes from multiple geographical sites sending the traffic to a single Mediation Engine. It is also possible to have multiple Mediation Engine installations in the same geographical site.
  • Aggregation Engine layer: This layer is responsible for aggregating the global KPIs from all the Mediation Engine linked to it, and for the global search features. In a typical setup, there is only one AE for the whole network.

Session Monitor system architecture
In the diagram above, acronyms have been used for the following products:

Table 1-8 Acronyms

Acronym Product Name
OCCPM Oracle Communications Control Plane Monitor
OCMEC Oracle Communications Mediation Engine Connector
OCOM Oracle Communications Operations Monitor
OCSM Oracle Communications Session Monitor

Each of the three layers supports high-availability by deploying two identical servers in active-passive or active-active modes of operation. For small setups, it is possible to run the probe layer and the Mediation Engine layer on the same physical hardware. The Aggregation Engine layer always requires its own hardware.

From the Session Monitor products perspective, the Operations Monitor and the Control Plane Monitor run on the Mediation Engine while the Mediation Engine Connector runs on the Aggregation Engine.

Upgrade Information

For upgrade related information, see the Oracle Communications Session Monitor Upgrade Guide Release 6.0.