Summary

Operational and Support Strategy

At the Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS), responsibilities for operations and support are
distributed between the International Data Centre (IDC) Division and the International
Monitoring System (IMS) Division.
A three-layer support approach has been developed to enable IMS stations to achieve their
very high data availability requirements.
Operations: provide the initial phase of troubleshooting, incident identification and
categorisation.
Maintenance and Logistics Support: provide second level support for the stations.
Engineering Support: activated if a problem requires redesign of the station or after
catastrophic failures when a total rebuild of a station may be necessary
The escalation of an incident depends on the required maintenance level.
Level One: preventive maintenance and servicing, preliminary diagnosis of faults and
corrective maintenance of a minor nature
Level Two: more extensive corrective and repair activities
Level Three: complete overhaul or re-engineering of equipment and or a system
required
Detection and Resolution
An incident is any event that is not part of the standard operation of the system. It is an
event that causes, or may cause, an interruption to the service.
The Operations Centre provides a single point of contact for all issues relating to the
operation of IMS stations, including incident identification, tracking and resolution.
Operations Centre staff continuously monitor the State of Health of all IMS components and
ensures they are ready and able to perform their intended tasks.
When certain State of Health criteria are not met, an incident alarm is generated at the
Operations Centre.
If an alarm relates to a new incident, Operations Centre staff will provide the initial phase
of troubleshooting, categorise the incident and determine responsibility. Where necessary
the problem will be passed on to colleagues with specialised knowledge of IMS stations, the
GCI, or IDC processing. This process is called escalation.
Once responsibility for the incident has been determined, a new IRS ticket is opened and
assigned to the appropriate entity. The ticket will then be tracked and updated until the
incident or problem has been resolved.

Incident Reporting
The Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS) is responsible for monitoring, assessing and
reporting on the operational status of all parts of the International Monitoring System (IMS).
The PTS relies on:
State of Health (SOH) monitoring
the IMS Reporting System (IRS)
The IMS Reporting System (IRS) is the principle tool for PTS and Station Operator
interaction. The IRS is a web-based tool used to log and track incidents and problems, and
to manage station operation configuration issues.
IRS reports (also known as tickets) can be added and updated via the IRS web interface or
by using specially formatted email templates.
IRS Client provides a way of creating properly formatted reports ready to be sent by email.
There are five main types of IRS Reports for IMS stations:
Monthly Report (MR)
Problem Report (PR)
Outage Request (OR)
Configuration Change Request (CCR)
Configuration Change Notification (CCN)
An additional two reports are only submitted by radionuclide laboratories, namely the
Laboratory Operations Report (LOR) and the Laboratory Outage Notification (LON). Further
details on these reports can be found in the IMS Operational Manual.
Role and Responsibilities of the Station Operator
The role and responsibilities of an IMS monitoring Station Operator (SO) are detailed in the
Post Certification Activities (PCA) Contract Terms of Reference (for stations operated under
PCA contracts) and in the IMS Operational Manual.
Essentially, the Station Operator must:
take care of equipment
monitor data during local regular working hours
report any issues and incidents
be responsive to requests from the Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS)