New technologies and innovations for 5G create new use cases and monetization opportunities to Communications Service Providers (CSPs). It also brings a set of new challenges and service expectations for CSPs on how to manage and operate their network, in order to meet the stringent SLA requirements for enterprise customers, and deliver superior quality of services and experience for those mission critical ultra-reliable, low-latency and high-bandwidth services.
With the increased complexity and volume of data sources, both network and operation teams are looking for new tools and/or service assurance platform to help them monitor and manage multi-layer 5G and RAN infrastructure in multi-vendor virtualized and containerized environments.
Multi-layer Automated Service Assurance from 5G Core to RAN
The real challenge is to tie these fault and performance monitoring and management capabilities into service delivery within 5G cloud-native environments, where thousands of virtual components are not connected to each other, multi-tenancy services, and cloud applications are not tied to any specific resources.
CSPs will need an open automated assurance platform that can give them near real-time visibility with deep actionable insights, and closed-loop operations and remediation capabilities that cut across infrastructure, orchestration and service layers for meeting SLA and service quality required.
With VMware Telco Cloud Platform, the award-winning leader of 5G Telco cloud native platform, and VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance, CSPs can reduce their cost and increase their operational efficiency with the best virtualization technologies and the best monitoring and assurance platform from VMware.
VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance
VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance for Mobile Service Assurance is a cross-domain, multi-layer automated assurance for CSPs that holistically monitors and manages their complex infrastructure and services from the core to the RAN.
It reduces complexity for operation teams in both Network Operations Center (NOC) and/or Service Operations Center (SOC) with a single pane of glass for Fault Management, Performance Management, Service Management, Configuration Management, Root Cause Analysis and Service Impact Analysis in a multi-vendor multi-cloud environment.
VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance extends its capabilities for 5G services such as:
- Multi-layer visibility and monitoring with deep insights for multi-vendor vRAN / O-RAN, xHaul, Core environment and also integrated with NFV Orchestrator.
- Real-time health and performance dashboard shows health and performance characteristics from the Core to RAN including network slice mapping.
- Prioritized root cause analysis (RCA) and business impact identifies loss of service impacting or degrading across multi-domain and multi-vendor stack. Prioritize most impacted customers based on SLA and mission-critical services.
- Monitoring health of network slices and services are all automated. It provides status of KPIs and SLAs proactively analyzing trends and patterns of the infrastructure preventing service impact. Anomalies are automatically identified and linked to root causes.
- Closed-loop automation, operation and remediation feed prescriptive RCA and monitoring insights to MANO tools such as VMware Telco Cloud Automation, OpenStack Heat, etc. Automatic action is possible as well known and repetitive faults occur to prevent service impactful events from happening.
- AI/ML-based analytics for deep actionable insights and automated alarm reduction. Correlate services impact with underlying infrastructure, automatic set baseline and anomaly detection and alarm reduction
5G Use Cases
CSPs can leverage VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance to address various use cases on the same platform:
- Network Slicing Assurance – when a fault occurs, the operator is automatically notified when a slice is impacted. Likewise if SLA are at risk or violated, operators will be automatically notified.
- 5G RAN/Core Assurance – Both CNF and VNFs are automatically discovered. They are shown graphically in the network topology map, including how they are tied to the subscriber’s services. When either CNF/VNFs are impacted by failures or exhibit performance degradation, operators will receive notifications. With actionable insights and root cause analysis, operators are able to response and remediate the root cause immediately.
- CaaS Assurance – VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance communicates with Kubernetes to extend self healing and remediation of underlying root cause when this happens below the Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) layer.
- NFVi Assurance – Similar to CaaS assurance, NFVI assurance provides self-healing and remediation of underlying infrastructure issues for the VIM layer.
- IP Assurance – automates RCA, correlation to upper layers of the infrastructure (e.g. CaaS layer) and auto-remediation of virtual and physical network elements
- MPLS and Routing Protocol Assurance – BGP, EIGRP, ISIS, OSPF – monitors complex L2, L3 networks and automatically determines causality of physical and virtual network infrastructure, and end-to-end connectivity. Remediation is achieved by invoking EMS, SDN controllers or by running predefined scripts matching the use case in question.
- Virtual EPC Assurance – dynamically models vEPCs, performance KPIs and connectivity through the infrastructure. Analytics enables operators to identify trends and correlate root cause. It can also automatically invoke orchestrators to heal or provide necessary resources.
Why VMware
In summary, VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance simplifies complexity for CSPs to monitor and manage end-to-end multi-vendor environments, reduces OPEX and improves service quality with intelligent analytics, automated operations and remediation. With integrated VMware Telco Cloud Automation and VMware vRealize Operations, VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance bring automated service assurance to a new generation of automated service assurance that CSPs are seeking.
To learn more about VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance, you can visit our website.
