Telco Products

Degust Quality Automation

Optimize User Experiences

Your users are the focus of your quality efforts? 
Quickly find and fix problems to optimize the user experience. This includes network throughput, service response times, page load times, and packet information such as RTT or jitter.

Don't waste time. Degust allows Immediate Start and Success

Since Degust is subscribed as a SaaS model, there is no financial risk and no long lead times to the first results.
The typical ROI of a Degust implementation is usually achieved after 4-6 weeks. 

Secure On-Site Service Monitoring

Degust combines End-to-End service monitoring with automatic troubleshooting in the TelCo core system. Upon findings at the edge of your networks, Degust runs protocol and signaling tests within your core and crawls system log files and network traces for errors. This is unique!

Flexible and Comprehensive

Beyond the standard features of modern monitoring solutions, Degust is used throughout the TelCos production chain. From the development teams at the OEM to the testbeds at the network operator to the live system.
Service engineers are also equipped with Degust Explorers for troubleshooting at end customers. Since the same tools are used everywhere, they can easily be supported by the operations staff at the first service appointment.

Using Degust OEMs, Service providers and ISPs are collaboration in  a revolutionary way

OEMs deliver products in conjunction with the tests created during development. ISPs are incorporation the OEM’s tests into their acceptance procedures. Live operation forces are using a subset of these tests during service activation and for live monitoring.
Unique to Degust: The revolution. Service issues are confirmed and reported by Degust. The monitoring and tests suites used to analyze and confirm the issues are passed on to the testbed and to the OEM to speed up error correction.

Sounds smart? Watch this:
ISP live environments, IPSs testbeds, and OEMs development environments are differently configured… there is no economic way to overcome this. To be honest, OEMs and vendors will never mimic an ISP’s complete environment configuration… just in case.
As the sole solution on the market, Degust transforms the test suites to fit into the destination’s environments requirements. Technically: we automatically transform peer authentications, user ids, APNs, IP address ranges, service policies, service IP addresses, failover configurations … you name it.

This accelerates all your tasks and duties!

Need Help with Cost Savings and Quality Improvements?

Your Takeaway

Your best people are currently working hard to keep your network up and running.
The still high manual portion of the work ties them up in this task.

With Degust, this is automated and people can focus on innovation and support engineering.

This in turn helps to save on external personnel and money.

Your customers will remain loyal if your network is stable, the promised performance is achieved and new products are brought to market quickly.

Degust enables you to meet your goals: the quality of your entire production chain will improve and project times will be dramatically reduced or at least safely met.

Because your costs will become much more predictable, you will be able to offer new services at a lower price than your competitors.
Your customers will love you.

Disruptions in the network cost money. A lot of money!

You have to take more people out of your day-to-day business to fix the disruptions, projects are delayed, external staff and additional call center resources have to be booked, and some customers have to be compensated.
In addition, there is a loss of reputation, since today disruptions are reported faster on the internet and in social media than to the network provider itself.

In countries where regulatory requirements grant customers to receive the promised quality and data throughput, Degust will keep you on track.
In Germany, this became true in December 1st of 2021 (ref Bundenetzagentur)

Degust brings you back to the top

Using Degust you’ll spot errors, often before the customer notices, and you can take immediate action.

While competitors define monitoring only at the system level, Degust monitors the service level!
You have brilliant quality assurance teams. They define hundreds of fine-grained tests in the pre-production phase to approve the system. As soon as the new systems or functions are live, however, you dispense with this knowledge and only estimate your quality checking system KPIs.

Degust allows you to perform pre-production testing permanently in the live environment to ensure the same quality as on day one.

Degust automates your tasks even in non-working hours.

Degust automates troubleshooting and acts as an operator. Degust detects errors, creates tickets, processes them, qualifies the errors, and applies pre-prepared solutions.

Your employees don’t need to be woken up and errors are solved faster.

In the end, Degust reports its work into your ticket system and informs the teams.

Need Help with Cost Savings and Quality Improvements?

Focus on Evolution Instead of Improvements

Raise your Service Quality with Acctopus Degust®

Let Degust test your services to detect errors – often before customers are noticing them. Acctopus Degust automates testing and operation in the complete production chain of mobile and fixed network operators.

Degust is used throughout the production chain

  • at OEMs side during the development and testing of service platforms
  • during type acceptance phases in the operator’s testbed
  • while integrating the service into your live environment
  • over the entire life cycle of the service through 7/24 monitoring of the services and
  • onsite at end-users edge environment in service appointments.

Degust is becoming the first choice for monitoring, testing, and troubleshooting as it incorporates the unique ability to

  • simulate the signaling traffic at the operator’s core interfaces,
  • emulate real E2E user behavior on real user equipment including roaming situations,
  • gather cross-platform evidence and
  • interface to 3rd party tools to leverage existing processes, functionalities, and investments.
That makes degust an invaluable one-stop support solution.

In contrast to other systems, tests and monitoring are used interchangeably:

  • monitoring processes can be started ad hoc to run only once as well as
  • tests can be used to monitor services 7/24. 

Lower Your Churn Rate

Keep your customers happy by providing seamless and error-free services.
By using Degust in your testbed, you are able to deliver quality products much faster. These new products let you keep up with customers’ demands for new functionality.
By using Degust in your live production environment, you will detect errors or unsightly system behavior much faster, often before your customers complain.

This will lead to better overall quality and much faster innovation which builds up a growing and loyal customer base.

Reduce Profit Loss

Degust helps you to restore your services fast

Troubleshooting with Analytics and Edge Automation

While monitoring your service, Degust is able to gather evidence from its own tests as well as from any 3rd party platform.
As soon as Degust detects anything went wrong, Degust starts more comprehensive tests, involves prospect platforms, starts their logging and monitoring facilities, collects and investigates the results. Degust will report the issues into the trouble ticket system of your operations center, attaching all evidence.

Without Degust, it would take much more time to collect these details.

Error Detection and Automated Correction

Degust relieves your staff especially during night shifts by preventing unnecessary 3rd level wake-up calls

Degust is constantly monitoring and detecting issues. If an issue is known to be recurring and requires to roll out a prepared fix, Degust will do this for you. It will record the issue into your trouble ticket systems, attaching all evidence and issuing the required retests.
Only if the retest still shows the error, Degust will forward the trouble ticket to the next department, where an operator can take it on.

This will speed up troubleshooting and restore the full service much faster. This again will keep errors away from your users and will offload your CSRs.

Not only that the 3rd level colleague is not disturbed, but he will also be 100% available on the next day.

Need Help with service recovery optimization?

Degust Principles

We developed Degust according to the needs of the network operators and OEMs. This supports the most efficient and flexible testing.
Here are some rules, which helped us to design the system

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Users interact with the network by issuing calls, sending messages, or using data (e.g., surfing, chatting, or VoIP). Most of the tremendous end-to-end test tools are using real computers or phones to emulate user interactions. Degust runs the tests using purpose build hardware, checks the results and reports as required. A broad range of devices is available for mobile operators, VoIP providers, and fixed data networks to deal with, e.g., the user’s CPE. E2E testing shows how the user experiences the network. Unfortunately, E2E testing will never prove whether the call or session was set up correctly. For this, you need more insights from the operator’s backend systems or log files. At this point, only Degust can help. Degust combines the ability to perform E2E tests with analysis of the operator’s core network to not only see that a session is taking place, but also to be sure that the session is set up correctly.
There are situations in which the user believes that the call was made as expected, but technically the call or data session was set up incorrectly. This often leads to losses for the network provider because it provides the service but may not be able or allowed to bill. In the worst case, they have to pay inter-operator charges for the service, which they cannot pass to their customers. E2E testing systems can only look at the connection from the outside, just like the user. E2E systems cannot detect such latent errors. Many network operators do not want the customer to see any errors. With a ‘no error to the customer’ rule, customers may be allowed into the network free of charge to avoid damaging the operator’s reputation. Here, too, E2E test systems fall for the errors and do not recognize the error. The provider will lose a lot of money if such errors are not detected. Degust is able to look behind the scenes – into the operator’s systems. Degust checks if the call or data session was set up correctly… in real-time during the test. Degust will notify the operator of any error, even if the user would not report an error in real life.
Although one could argue that end-to-end testing is the holy grail of testing, it takes time…. a lot of time. For mobile network operators, end-to-end testing is limited to the number of available non-shareable devices (UEs). Being limited to end-to-end testing and required to test the consumption of 3 GByte of date, you need an available UE. Depending on the network capabilities at the location of the UE, this will take minutes or even hours. During this time, no other test can run on the same UE… you need to wait until the running test finishes. The end-to-end session is the sum of user interaction and signaling within the operator’s network, at the core interfaces. Degust is simulating these core interfaces and their protocols to pretend the consumption of the 3 GByte mentioned above. This significantly speeds up the test. If you need to have an end-to-end view but you don’t have the time to wait that long, Degust will activate the session at the Global Client (UE for E2E) and in parallel is simulate the signaling of the data consumption to the OCS core interface. This again saves testing time and frees up the UE much earlier. If the above test incorporates roaming, you may not want to retry these tests on and on again, as you may have to top up money on a prepaid account. While this again takes up valuable time, it also costs a fortune in international operator charges. Simulating the major part of the usage makes testing faster and affordable. For fixed-line operators, end-to-end testing is also challenging, as it again requires a lot of systems. Here it is critical to control these hundreds of systems according to the required tests. Degust is the solution. Degust steers an armada of SBCs (single board computer) to run the required tests. Degust can efficiently run a significant six-digit number of devices concurrently. Degust additionally handles the software versions of that devices and can use the operator’s custom scripts.
Simulating core interface protocols enables Degust to pretend situations, which may be challenging or even impossible to test in E2E scenarios. Degust could e.g. pretend to change time zones or networks between calls. You could also run smoke tests, sending wrong or misleading information for troubleshooting, interoperability, and stability tests. In testbed environments, if a particular service is unavailable, Degust can jump in and take over the role of the service on the interface level.
Although we have years of experience in network testing, Acctopus is not claiming to know any situation or any system in the operator’s network. But Degust is built to interface to any system – as long it provides an API, a CLI, or a web browser front-end. This helps to start processes, provision subscribers, start logging or tracing, and gather evidence. Expect Degust to get all required information in just minutes.
Acctopus believes in sharing. With Degust, operators can use the very same tests during type acceptance sessions as well as during go-live events. This ensures, that the exact same Tests are used for activating a system to the customer as they have been used during integration tests. This comes with some magnificent advantages:
  • save time on defining new tests for test environments, staging, and live systems
  • feed back live tests into future tests in your testbed
  • involve your OEM in your testing – they will love to get the tests from you
  • start tests in CI and CD tasks by triggering the Degust API
As the Degust Cockpit is an in-browser application, you don’t even require installing local software and you never need to export/import tests between local test tool installations. Just configure your team and your resources and use the rights management of Degust to let OEMs or even contractors test the service.

Target Groups - Who uses Degust?

You want to know how we will boost your business?

>the shelterbestSouthwestern Regional User Group Conference Home Page