d for rural equipment sites, where such site support elements are used regularly. Site safety has to be ensured from time to time, to prevent any kind of vandalism or pilferages. Towers need to be painted and checked for any kind of rusting or changes in alignment due to equipment or wind loading. Performance Monitoring and Remote Health Check Remote logins to the different network elements provide an excellent way of doing health checks on the various network elements. Alarms can be checked from time to time, memory disks can be checked Care Phase Malfunction Detection Repair Figure A.12 Performance monitoring and remote health check-up for remaining space, software fallbacks can be taken at regular intervals, light emitting diode (LED) indications of the hardware units can be monitored for tracing faulty units that can affect the system performance, etc. While the equipment is running many inevitable malfunctions may go unnoticed and later bundle-up into a big problem resulting in a drop in performance levels. As the network expands the more difficult it becomes to monitor it end to end. The best way is to monitor it centrally by having an automatic monitoring mechanism that searches for malfunctions by looking into the system, detects them and repairs them in a premature stage before they mature into serious issues (Figure A.12). Network monitoring systems provide counters related to the performance of the equipment, which can be extracted online or offline from the database by performance monitoring tools used by the operator or the vendor. There are hundreds of counters covering all the network elements and not all are used in daily performance reporting. These counters are useful from a software and service point of view and help in monitoring performance. These monitoring tools use certain algorithms based on calculating key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to analyse these counter data and present them graphically in the form of tables and charts correlating performance levels with respect to time. 