“CROME”  (Cell Reporting and Object Management Environment), is a 100% pure JAVA application/applet for managing the reporting needs of wireless service providers.  CROME is a performance-reporting tool that solves the needs of real time and long-term trend analysis and statistical performance.  CROME can identify problems down to the level of a single radio in a wireless network, thus it is invaluable for assisting RF engineers and system planners.  The true power is its ability to quickly and efficiently roll low level data utilized by engineers into comprehensive, concise reports that marketing, sales, and upper management will use to improve operations, and add new subscribers.  Every authorized user in your organization is free to run reports when they need them, across time periods they require, and with their own custom groupings.

CROME reporting can be run from a browser (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer) or can be run as a stand-alone application.  When run as an application, there are no browser security restrictions, and thus more features are available  (such as local printing, local file access to save reports and formulas, etc.).

Operationally, CROME provides the means to quickly produce reports that have been defined locally by the user or stored as “system-wide” reports.  The report editing capabilities are extremely flexible, with a point-and-click interface to format the report and to select the appropriate pegs or formulas.  Formulas themselves are defined with the same point-and-click interface, and can contain a variety of pegs, mathematical functions, constants, and even formulas-within-formulas.  Even after a report and its formulas are defined, the same report can display information in hundreds of different ways, by dynamically selecting choices when running the report.  Such choices include time granularity (hours, days, weeks, months, years), summary options (daily, pre-defined bouncing-busy-hour, ad-hoc "bouncing busy hour on the fly", etc.), viewing the data by its network element, and specifying the desired physical network level.  CROME also provides the ability to run any report within an arbitrary grouping of user-defined network elements, and a flexible editor to create the groups (which allows direct selection of known network elements and regular-expression grouping).

The CROME system is capable of supporting a distributed deployment and can also be configured such that it is fault tolerant for high availability operation in the event of an individual server failure for transparent non-stop access by any client.

This user’s guide takes you through the initial steps of installing CROME as a native application, invoking CROME, and through each of the major features from running reports, editing/creating reports, editing/creating formulas, editing/creating groups, and other features that assist the process of creating your desired reports.