The Integrated Monitoring Feed (IMF) is a licensed feature that is supported on the DSC Platform.
This feature provides selected MSUs as they enter or exit the DSC Platform in sequential order to an external monitoring application (or a third party probe) over IP. Each MSU is sent using a connection specific interface that includes generic information such as time stamp, link/user ID, MSU direction, media type NA, and SS7 Variant. The external monitoring application may provide network analysis and external data representation (XDR) for the DSC Platform.
The IMF applies to incoming and outgoing SS7 link-based traffic and standard IP traffic (SUA and M3UA).
Up to five external monitoring application interfaces and IP transport are configurable on each Routing CPU. TCP/IP connectivity between the IMF and external IP monitoring applications is configured using a dedicated port on the CPU. For information about the DSC Platform IP configuration, refer to the Installation Guides.
You may enable the IMF feature for a MTP3 linkset or a Signaling Gateway (SG) service to setup the associated traffic monitoring. For more information, refer to Configuring the Signaling Gateway and the appropriate section in the SS7 Application Guide 1.
If required, the DSC Platform allows the capturing of packets information to a file, which then can be downloaded to your computer and can be analyzed using Wireshark. For information about the required Wireshark plug-in and the instructions for installing and compiling this plug-in, refer to Configuring Wireshark.