VMware by Broadcom introduces important feature upgrades and new capabilities to empower service providers to achieve cross-domain service assurance with end-to-end network visibility and control, gain deeper understanding of their networks with advanced alerting and insights, and simplify network operations with enhanced platform operability. These enhancements are part of the 2.4 release of VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance, released on September 10, 2024.
Telco Cloud Service Assurance is a comprehensive solution designed to give service providers deeper insights across multiple domains, including radio access networks (RAN), core networks, transport networks, and with this latest release, software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN). Through its automated discovery and topology mapping across multiple sites, Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides real-time insights into network health and performance, empowering you to gain a comprehensive understanding of your networks and proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact customer experience. With Telco Cloud Service Assurance, you gain the capabilities to command and control complex large-scale, multi-domain, distributed networks:
- Take advantage of machine learning and advanced analytics to identify and rapidly troubleshoot the root causes of network issues and anomalies.
- Remediate issues and anomalies either manually or through automation. Automated remediation is achieved through integration with the telco automation capabilities offered by VMware.
- Optimize network performance, reduce downtime, and improve customer satisfaction, ultimately driving business growth.
End-to-end Network Visibility and Control
Service providers face significant challenges to get a comprehensive view of their network, often relying on multiple monitoring tools to gain insights into different components, leading to fragmented visibility and inefficient troubleshooting. To address these challenges, Telco Cloud Service Assurance adds a comprehensive observability and assurance solution to the latest release of VMware Telco Cloud Platform. In addition, it extends its capabilities to include SD-WAN by integrating with VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN solutions. This combination lets you harness the advanced features of Telco Cloud Service Assurance to gain end-to-end visibility and control over your entire network, from Core and RAN to WAN, ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and security for customers.
To cater to the diverse requirements of various stakeholders involved in network operations, VMware has introduced multi-tenancy support, allowing service providers to utilize Telco Cloud Service Assurance across multiple use cases and tailor it to the needs of different teams or organizations. With granular access control over dashboards and reports, each tenant has a customized view of their network operations and performance metrics while maintaining a protected and isolated monitoring environment.
Advanced Alerting and Insights
When monitoring a vast network, service providers encounter difficulties managing a multitude of alerts with intricate logic, often involving multiple parameters. To alleviate these difficulties, Telco Cloud Service Assurance has been enhanced with advanced alarm management capabilities:
- You can create customized alerting rules by defining complex threshold logic combining multiple conditions and parameters for alarms and triggers.
- Alarm messages can now be customized with multiple tags dynamically populated with data from multiple collectors to generate targeted notifications.
With such advanced alarm management capabilities, you can create sophisticated rules that incorporate nuanced conditions such as triggering an alarm with a medium severity if a server’s CPU usage falls within a definable range (50%-75%) and memory usage exceeds a certain threshold (70%) while appending the server name and rack details received from the collector using tags defined in the alarms.
The latest release of Telco Cloud Service Assurance lets you schedule reports to be generated from dashboards and deliver them as PDF files that provide a timely overview of network performance and trends. You can also create alarms directly from Grafana Reports, streamlining the process of monitoring and analyzing network metrics. In addition, notifications generated by alarms can now be exported as CSV files, easing analysis and integration with other systems.
Enhanced Platform Operability
The authentication capabilities of Telco Cloud Service Assurance have been extended to simplify the user authentication process. With the introduction of external identity provider integration, Telco Cloud Service Assurance supports Open Authorization 2.0 (OAuth 2.0) for customer identification using the customer ID. This enables you to seamlessly authenticate users, eliminate the need for multiple login domains, and streamline the user experience.
With the announcement of the end of support for VMware Smart Assurance, VMware has migrated key capabilities of VMware Smart Assurance to Telco Cloud Service Assurance, ensuring a seamless transition and continuity of service for existing customers of VMware Smart Assurance. Specifically, the Smarts module of VMware Smart Assurance has been integrated as Smarts Domain Manager to enhance the visibility of network infrastructure.
The upgrade process for remote domain managers has been simplified, enabling customers to initiate and schedule upgrades directly from Telco Cloud Service Assurance. With the flexibility to upgrade remote domain managers independently, you can tailor the upgrades to meet your requirements. Each upgrade is tracked as a separate task to ease the monitoring and management of the upgrade process. This approach minimizes network disruption, ensuring uninterrupted service delivery and business continuity.
For more information on the other enhancements in Telco Cloud Service Assurance 2.4, see the release notes. For a comprehensive overview of how Telco Cloud Service Assurance enables end-to-end multi-domain, multi-vendor service assurance, visit our website.
