Technical FAQ:
Oracle SBC, Session Manager, SIP and Management

Oracle SBC is Oracle's family of Session Border Controllers, based on the Acme Packet OS. The Oracle Communications Session Border Controller connects distinct IP networks while mitigating security threats, resolving interoperability problems and ensuring reliable communications.

It is the most widely deployed SBC in the world and serves five critical carrier areas: security, interoperability, reliability and quality, regulatory compliance and revenue and cost optimization. It runs on dedicated Oracle hardware or on general-purpose servers, and is also available in a microservices-based Cloud Native edition.

A Session Border Controller (SBC) is installed at the borders between IP networks and acts as the demarcation and control point for voice, video and unified communications sessions. It works as a back-to-back user agent (B2BUA), keeping full session state with the endpoints, inspecting packets and applying fine-grained controls over SIP signaling and media.

Its security functions include protection against overload and denial-of-service attacks, access control against fraud and service theft, topology hiding, and encryption and authentication to preserve confidentiality. The SBC enables secure carrier interconnection, enterprise SIP Trunking and the controlled exposure of voice services to the internet.

The Oracle Communications Core Session Manager (CSM) is used when a SIP session-control core is needed in IMS and NGN architectures. It performs IMS session-control functions (such as S-CSCF and I-CSCF), routing the next hop of each SIP session based on configurable precedence — by registrar (HSS) or by local policy.

It suits scenarios requiring scalable policy-based routing, integration with subscriber databases and application servers, and high availability. It is often pre-integrated with the Oracle SBC, leveraging its security, reliability and compliance features. For routing high volumes of SIP signaling as a proxy, Oracle also offers the Session Router (IETF SIP proxy and 3GPP BGCF functions).

A SIP Trunk is the virtual version of the old physical phone lines. Instead of circuits such as PRI or ISDN, it uses the SIP protocol over IP to connect a company's PBX or IP-PBX to the public telephone network (PSTN) over the internet, provided by an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP).

SIP handles the signaling — starting, keeping and ending sessions — while the media travels in RTP packets. Each SIP Trunk groups several channels, and each channel equals one line (one simultaneous call). This allows capacity to scale by adding channels without new cabling, consolidating voice and data on the same network and reducing costs.

In enterprise environments, the SIP Trunk usually terminates on an SBC, which ensures security, carrier-to-PBX interoperability and call quality.

OCSM (Oracle Communications Session Monitor) is an end-to-end, real-time service-monitoring, troubleshooting and analytics solution that provides comprehensive visibility into VoIP and unified-communications networks. It is a passive, non-intrusive solution: probes — which may be embedded in the Oracle SBC itself or on dedicated hardware — capture traffic from protocols such as SIP, RTP, DIAMETER, DNS and ENUM and send it to a Mediation Engine, which stores and correlates the data.

It enables real-time call correlation across multiple sites, root-cause analysis with call-flow (ladder) diagrams, media-quality metrics and drill-down to the packet level. The OCSM family includes the Operations Monitor, the Enterprise Operations Monitor, the Fraud Monitor and the Control Plane Monitor, and is used to diagnose call-quality problems, prevent fraud and reduce churn.

Grafana does not collect data by itself: it is the visualization layer that consumes metrics stored in a time-series database. When monitoring an Oracle SBC, the typical flow is to collect the SBC's indicators — via SNMP, the HDR (Historical Data Recording) counters or the SBC's own REST API — and feed a database such as Prometheus, PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB or InfluxDB.

Grafana then queries that database and presents dashboards with KPIs such as active and concurrent sessions, call attempts and success rate (ASR), failure rate, CPU and memory usage, license occupancy, HA state and media quality. This makes it possible to track trends, set threshold-based alerts and correlate events over time. This integration — collection, time-series store and visualization — is part of Ositron's engineering work.

SIP troubleshooting is the evidence-driven investigation of a call's signaling, to isolate the exact layer where the failure occurs. It starts from a capture (PCAP) and the reading of the SIP dialog: the sequence of requests (INVITE, ACK, BYE) and responses (1xx provisional, 2xx success, 3xx redirection, 4xx client error, 5xx server error, 6xx global failure).

A call-flow (ladder) diagram shows the exchange between elements and reveals where the dialog broke — for example, a 403, 404 or 488 indicating, respectively, forbidden, non-existent destination or media incompatibility. The analysis correlates the signaling with the SBC logs and with the media (RTP/RTCP) to separate the cause across the signaling, media, transport and application layers, until reaching the verifiable root cause — without speculation. Tools such as Oracle Session Monitor and captures on the SBC itself support this process.

Structured cabling is a standardized infrastructure of cables, connectors, outlets, patch panels, racks and other elements used to distribute communication services such as Ethernet networks, IP telephony, Wi-Fi and security systems.

In short:

cabling is the organized, standardized physical infrastructure that supports a facility's communication network, providing greater organization, ease of maintenance, expansion and reliability.

We at Ositron work in partnership with MÓDULOX, a cabling specialist based in Rio de Janeiro. For more details, see Services | Structured Cabling in the menu.