Using the CLI to Manage Subscriber Service Sessions

The CLI-based Service Manager creates static subscriber sessions and service sessions. You can also use CLI commands to immediately deactivate subscriber service sessions. The CLI-based support is particularly useful for:

• Testing your service definitions—for example, you might use the CLI commands to verify that a newly created service definition is correct. When you are satisfied with the service definition, you can then use RADIUS to activate the service for your subscribers.
• Preprovisioning Service Manager services—preprovisioning improves performance and efficiency by freeing Service Manager from having to repeatedly create and remove a service that you activate and deactivate for multiple subscribers. See Preprovisioning Services for more information about service preprovisioning.

Using the CLI to Activate Subscriber Service Sessions

A subscriber session represents a specific subscriber—the session consists of the subscriber’s name, the interface used for the session, and any active services for the subscriber. A subscriber can have one subscriber session active at any given time.

You create a subscriber’s service session when you assign a service definition to a subscriber session. Like an AAA-created service, a single subscriber session can have multiple simultaneous service sessions. You can use one method to create the subscriber session, and then a different method to activate the subscriber’s service session. For example, you might use RADIUS to create the AAA subscriber session, then use the CLI to activate the service session for the subscriber, You can optionally specify a service session profile that you want to attach to the service session.

You can use the CLI to activate a service session based on subscriber information or owner information:

• Subscriber name and interface method—Activates the service session based on the subscriber name and the interface that the subscriber is using for this subscriber session.
  host1(config)#service-management subscriber-session client1@isp1.com interface atm 4/0.1 service-session “ tiered(1280000, 5120000)”
• Owner name and ID method—Activates the service session based on the owner that created the subscriber session and the ID that was generated by the owner. For example, if RADIUS is used to create the subscriber session, the owner name is AAA and the owner ID is the Acct-Session-ID that was generated by RADIUS during subscriber creation.
  host1(config)#service-management owner-session AAA 537446 service-session “ tiered(1280000, 5120000)”

  Note: You must specify the parameter values in the order in which the parameters appear in the template name of the service definition file. Enclose the service definition name in double quotation marks, with the service’s parameter values in parentheses. For example, for the tiered service that is defined in Figure 29, the template name is: <# tiered(inputBW, outputBW) #> Use the following format with the service-session keyword: “ tiered(1280000, 5120000)”

Preprovisioning Services

Preprovisioning service sessions is a technique you can use to improve Service Manager’s performance. Typically, when you use a service definition to activate a subscriber’s service session, Service Manager uses resources to build that service. However, if you later use the same service definition to activate a service session for a second subscriber, Service Manager does not have to rebuild the service—it bases the new service on the service that it built for the first service session. After you deactivate the first session, Service Manager must build a new service for any subsequent subscribers.

Preprovisioning entails activating a service for a dummy user on the null interface. You can then use the preprovisioned service session to activate service sessions for actual subscribers. This technique improves performance because you only require Service Manager to build the service one time, then reuse the original service when you activate future subscriber service sessions.

To preprovision a service you use a command similar to the following example:

Using Service Session Profiles

Service session profiles provide additional flexibility to the Service Manager application by enabling you to assign one or more supported attributes to a particular activation of a service.

For example, you might assign the same video service to two subscribers, but use different service session profiles to set different time limits for each subscriber’s service. One subscriber uses the video service for 5 hours (18000 seconds) while the other subscriber’s video service is for 10 hours (36000 seconds). Or, you might enable statistics on a subscriber’s voice service and disable statistics on the same subscriber’s video service.

You can create multiple service session profiles independent of the service activation process. Then, when you activate a service session, you specify the profile that you want to use with that particular service session—you can apply one profile to a service session.

You can configure the following attributes in service session profiles:

• statistics—Enables statistics and specifies the type of statistics you want to capture for the service. See Configuring Service Manager Statistics for additional information about capturing Service Manager statistics. You can specify the following types of statistics:
  • time—The service’s duration
  • volume-time—The service’s duration and traffic volume
• volume—Specifies that the service is automatically deactivated when the indicated traffic volume is exceeded.
• time—Specifies that the service is automatically deactivated when the indicated time period is exceeded.

  Note: The volume and time attributes use values captured by the Service Manager statistics feature to determine when the threshold is exceeded. Service Manager collects time statistics by default—you must configure and enable volume statistics collection. See Configuring Service Manager Statistics .

To create or modify a service session profile:

1. Specify the name of the service session profile; doing this enters Service Session Profile Configuration mode.
   host1(config)#service-management service-session-profile vodISP1 host1(config-service-session-profile)#
2. Specify the attributes you want to include in the profile.
   host1(config-service-session-profile)#statistics volume-time host1(config-service-session-profile)#time 6000
3. (Optional) To modify an existing profile, you can add new attributes or use the no version of a command to remove an attribute.
   host1(config-service-session-profile)#no time

Using the CLI to Deactivate Subscriber Service Sessions

The CLI supports several methods that enable you to manually deactivate service sessions. You can:

• Gracefully terminate all services or a specific service for a particular subscriber
• Gracefully terminate all service or a specific service associated with a particular owner
• Force the immediate termination of all of a subscriber’s sessions
• Use service session profiles to create time or volume thresholds for the service and deactivate the service when the threshold is reached. See Using Service Session Profiles.

  Note: You can use the CLI commands described in this section to delete subscriber and service sessions that are created by either RADIUS or the CLI.

The Service Manager CLI commands enable you to use variations of the no service-management subscriber-session command to terminate service sessions.

Gracefully Deactivating Subscriber Service Sessions

Use the following commands to gracefully deactivate subscriber’s services—you can deactivate a specific service for a subscriber, or you can delete a subscriber session, which deactivates all of the subscriber’s service sessions. We recommend you use this command to deactivate subscriber service sessions.

Forcing Immediate Deactivation of Subscriber Service Sessions

Use the following command to force the immediate deactivation of the specified subscriber session—doing this deletes all active service sessions for the subscriber. We recommend this method if you encounter difficulty when you used the graceful deactivation method. Always use the graceful method first.

Using Service Session Profiles to Deactivate Service Sessions

To terminate a subscriber service session when a threshold is reached, you create a service session profile that includes a time threshold, or a volume threshold, or both. Then, you attach the service session profile when you activate the service session. When the specified threshold is reached, the service session is terminated.

Note: This feature is not supported by the service-management owner-session command. The service-management owner-session command only supports service session profiles when activating service sessions.

The following example shows the commands you might use to create a time threshold for deactivating a service session. See Using Service Session Profiles for information about using the time and volume keywords in service session profiles.

To create or modify a service session profile:

1. Specify the name of the service session profile and configure the threshold:
   host1(config)#service-management service-session-profile vodISP1 host1(config-service-session-profile)#time 6000 host1(config-service-session-profile)#exit
2. Include the service session profile when you activate the subscriber service session:
   host1(config)#service-management subscriber-session client1@isp1.com interface atm 4/0.1 service-session “video(4500000, 192.168.10.3)” service-session-profile vodISP1