Operational Imperative of Automated Active Testing and Monitoring
The business impact and ROI of Cisco Orchestrated Assurance powered by Netrounds
The business impact and ROI of Cisco Orchestrated Assurance powered by Netrounds
To stay competitive, telecom operators strive to deliver network services more quickly and with assured quality. Using fully automated and programmable network solutions is therefore a primary necessity.
To increase agility and the rate of delivery, network environments are becoming increasingly software-defined and programmable, and, as a consequence, the rate at which these dynamic environments change is soaring, driven by on-demand requests from end users and automation loops that trigger device reconfigurations. In addition, networks are also subject to other unpredictable events caused by the varying nature of end-user traffic.
Traditional test and assurance solutions built for static environments are not suited for this new, dynamic landscape. Without support for programmability, these traditional solutions prevent agility and innovation.
Cisco® Orchestrated Assurance powered by Netrounds is a concept combining Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) as the network service orchestrator with Netrounds as the programmable active test and assurance system. Orchestrated Assurance uses Netrounds’ software-based Test Agents, which are suited for both physical and virtualized networks.
Orchestrated Assurance improves your network operations organization and related work processes in several fundamental ways:
These changes will give a huge boost to your overall operations efficiency and to your ability to control customer experience in an agile and dynamic environment.
This white paper elaborates on the motivation and drivers to start implementing Orchestrated Assurance today.
The purpose of this white paper is to describe how Orchestrated Assurance can benefit your organization and assist you in maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic network environments. It first describes what end users care about and how this relates to service quality assurance though testing and assuring services. The paper then proceeds to explain how you can tackle and solve operational efficiency and other network
quality problems by implementing Orchestrated Assurance from Netrounds and Cisco.
In an accompanying white paper, you will find a thorough walk-through of the principles and fundamentals of how Orchestrated Assurance works. For technical details, refer to this document.
As network operators or communications service providers, your customers expect their services to be delivered instantly after they order them, and they expect those services to work immediately at the time of delivery. In addition, customers expect that problems will be solved immediately if they occur during the lifetime of the service. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. Two most important end-user concerns
To make sure that you are meeting your customers’ expectations, there are two basic activities to adopt: service activation testing and ongoing quality monitoring from your customers’ point of view. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2. What operators need to do to meet customer expectations
It is possible to address both of the two essential activities using Netrounds active testing capabilities, fully automated through Cisco NSO.
The main benefits for you as an operator or service provider, are decreased costs related to your network operations and improved customer satisfaction. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3. Benefits of implementing Orchestrated Assurance using Netrounds active testing
Depending on your specific network and operational environment, you can expect savings in the order of $1M to $6M over a five-year period. The main contributors to cost savings are:
Refer to a thorough ROI calculation in a separate accompanying document.
Orchestrated Assurance revolves around two simple, yet very important, themes:
Cisco NSO automates network-wide configuration of network devices and VNFs across domains and network layers. NSO is independent of the type of vendor or services being provisioned. Figure 4 illustrates how Cisco NSO and Netrounds work together to achieve Orchestrated Assurance.
Figure 4. How Cisco NSO and Netrounds work together
To make sure that the service has been provisioned successfully, Cisco NSO requests Netrounds to perform comprehensive and automated tests as part of the service activation process.
After successful verification of service provisioning, Netrounds also provides continuous service quality insight from the end users’ viewpoint through ongoing, active monitoring from the same Netrounds Test Agents already deployed in your network.
This provides Cisco NSO and other network management systems with real-time quality metrics to help discover issues earlier and resolve those issues more quickly.
Orchestrated Assurance positively impacts your network as it adds active testing capabilities in the fulfillment and assurance phases of your service delivery processes. This is depicted as orange building blocks in Figure 5. Note that active testing is complementary to the existing components.
Figure 5. Active testing in the service Orchestration loop
There is some confusion in the industry regarding the term assurance and what it really means. Most network operators already have a wide range of legacy systems in place for fault and performance management, as illustrated by the gray elements in Figure 6. However, as the orange region in Figure 6 suggests, it is clear that active testing is required to answer two critical end-user questions:
Figure 6. How Netrounds active testing (orange) complements traditional assurance components
Looking at the legacy assurance systems that might exist in your network today:
Existing assurance solutions often attempt to estimate how end users are experiencing their end-to-end services by combining and correlating device-oriented and passive infrastructure counters with other alarm sources, syslogs, traps, and inventories. This cumbersome and unreliable correlation activity, and the use of passive, non-real-time data sources that are not naturally related, results in an inaccurate picture of end-to-end service quality as experienced by your customers. This is illustrated in Figure 7.
Figure 7. The Impossible Mapping Machine
As the machine’s name implies, the mapping is virtually impossible to accomplish because there is very little direct correlation between the collected infrastructure-centric counters and actual end-user experience. Therefore, the Impossible Mapping Machine produces a misleading view of the actual end-to-end service quality. Instead of guiding the operations team toward a solution, this correlation of passive monitoring sources by the Impossible Mapping Machine creates the following challenges:
Table 1 sums up how testing and assurance are typically done today with legacy assurance systems and how they are accomplished when you have implemented Orchestrated Assurance.
Table 1. Testing and assurance today and in an Orchestrated Assurance scenario
Task |
Traditional Approach |
Orchestrated Assurance |
Service activation testing: |
Manual ICMP ping |
Automated as part of fulfillment process Best possible test coverage |
Service activation testing: reachability of services |
Manual, by on-site technician (if any) |
Automated as part of fulfillment process Best possible test coverage |
Customer KPI monitoring and SLA follow-up |
General, based on counters and statistics from network elements and infrastructure Availability only |
Customer-specific monitoring end to end from customer perspective Availability plus disturbances |
Troubleshooting |
Manual using ICMP ping or other simple tools Truck rolls and handheld hardware testers |
Automated and carrier-grade, with best possible test coverage Software-based with feedback to Cisco NSO and other systems |
Assurance of dynamic, fast-changing, on-demand service deliveries |
(Not possible) |
Fully implemented as part of service: automation is key |
Sorry, no results matched your search criteria(s). Please try again.
The most fundamental improvements that Orchestrated Assurance brings to your organization and to your processes are these:
Combined, these changes give a huge boost to your overall operations efficiency and to your ability to control customer experience in an agile and dynamic environment.
The concept of Orchestrated Assurance is key to achieving full network automation. It addresses two main end user requirements for network operators:
Table 2 describes the three main benefits you achieve with Cisco Orchestrated Assurance powered by Netrounds.
Table 2. Primary benefits of Cisco Orchestrated Assurance powered by Netrounds
Benefits |
Promises |
Improved operational efficiency |
Savings through reduced trouble ticket escalation and test automation Save in the order of $1M to $6M in five years |
Get started immediately |
Deploy a complete Netrounds system in hours Integrate Netrounds with Cisco NSO and performance management/fault management systems in days, without lengthy integration projects |
Smooth transition to virtualization |
Full automation of test and assurance Start physical, move to hybrid and fully virtualized |
Sorry, no results matched your search criteria(s). Please try again.