Co-authored by Sumit Verdi and Kaela Loffler, VP Marketing Netrounds
Service assurance is paramount to the success of CSPs deploying services that meet the demanding expectations of customers today. To operate an on-demand network, CSPs must proactively ensure that they are continually meeting their SLA commitments.1
“NFV is shifting from a technology focus to operations, from ‘How do we do this?’ to ‘How do we operate this?’” wrote Sandra O’Boyle, the Senior Analyst at Heavy Reading focusing on CEM and Customer Analytics, in her recent article titled NFV Service Assurance – In Need of Big Data, Small Data, or Both?
O’Boyle also added that “CSPs are very clear they do not want to be over-run with meaningless events and data being pushed up from the resource later to the service management layer, and want to be able to prioritize customer-impacting events and automate fixes.”2
And active testing and monitoring is the key piece of the service assurance toolbox that CSPs need in order to ensure success with dynamic services. Active test data provides real time views on network service quality from the customer perspective and allows CSPs to automatically test services after each deployment or change.
To help our CSP customers take control over infrastructure health as well as service quality VMware and Netrounds developed our joint Active Assurance solution. The combined solution provides end-to-end service and infrastructure visibility, service monitoring and analytics, and service remediation to drive optimal network performance and deliver higher Quality of Experience for subscribers.
This solution helps our agile CSP customers to:
- Test services from the end-customer perspective
- Conduct ongoing real-time monitoring of services
- Adapt automatically to dynamic service and infrastructure changes
- Isolate issues and resolve problems faster through correlation across infrastructure and service metrics
- Reduce manual activities for testing and troubleshooting
- Maintain a comprehensive view of end-to-end service, virtualization, infrastructure, and inter-site transport quality with Netrounds and VMware vRealize Operations
The combination of VMware vRealize Operations and Netrounds offers service onboarding, active testing, continuous and scheduled monitoring and assurance for all deployed services, and closed-loop triggering for scaling and healing to minimize service degradations in real time. Where vRealize Operations continually monitors all infrastructure components responsible for the delivery of the service, from the underlying hardware to the hypervisor, networking, and virtual machines that make up the VNF and the service itself, Netrounds provides real-time insight into how the end customer is experiencing the service.
The VMware operations workflows leverage Netrounds’ programmable flexibility to drive on-demand tests for enhanced service performance analysis. Netrounds active monitoring will proactively detect service degradation for a VOIP service, for example, before it hits the end customer. This SLA violation will trigger a workflow that manages resource uplift for the media-plane telephone VMs. The workflow will also trigger an automatic test that validates that the service works according to the SLA after the resource change.
Next step? Proactively find and fix the issue before your customer notices a degradation in their service and calls in with complaints.
To read more about Active Assurance from VMware and Netrounds, read our solution overview here. Attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona? Make sure to stop by VMware’s booth in Hall 3 Stand 3K10, from February 26 to March 1, to see Active Assurance live in action.
Keen to go a little deeper with a one-on-one demo and discussion? Contact us at [email protected] to schedule a meeting. We look forward to meeting you there!
References:
1VMware and Netrounds Active Assurance Solution for Communications Service Providers Solution Overview
2Heavy Reading (2017). NFV Assurance and Analytics Survey. September 2017. n=105 service providers
