As an operator of private 5G networks, you need an end-to-end view of what's happening in your network.

When your subscriber receives an SMS, that message goes through different systems:

  • The Short Message Service Centre (SMSC): stores and forwards the SMS
  • The Core: tells the SMSC where the subscriber can be reached
  • The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS): delivers the message to the phone

If messages aren't delivered or take a long time to do so, you need to know exactly why without guessing.

All our products support OpenTelemetry tracing. Not only can you follow events inside Ella Core, Ella SMSC and Ella IMS, but with distributed tracing, you can now follow events as they traverse those systems.

Tracing SMS delivery in Ella Networks products
Distributed trace of an SMS delivered across Ella SMSC, Ella Core and Ella IMS

This trace shows one SMS being delivered over IMS, from the routing lookup to the actual phone. The whole delivery took 2.99 ms: 1.40 ms in Ella IMS, 0.49 ms in Ella Core, 0.49 ms in Ella SMSC, plus 0.62 ms between components.

With tracing you can also understand failures when they happen, you can trace a specific message, you can correlate with logs, and much more. This feature is not just for SMS messages but all cross-component communication in Ella Networks software.

Traces are exported over standard OTLP. You can use tools like Grafana Tempo, Jaeger or any OpenTelemetry backend to store and visualize them. You can turn tracing on in each of our Ella products by adding a short telemetry block in your configuration file:

telemetry:
  enabled: true
  otlp-endpoint: "10.34.21.41:4317"

Distributed tracing is available today in Ella Core, Ella SMSC and Ella IMS. See the observability documentation in each product to get started.