Seeing the big picture, solving the right problem and finding the answer faster.
Networks are becoming more complex. Software-defined networks, network functions virtualization, network slicing combined with customer managed services through portals to allow the addition, modification and deletion of services means it’s becoming harder and harder for operations teams to stay on top of things.
More than that, customers are becoming more sophisticated and demanding with regards to the services they purchase—especially when it comes to quality. Virtualization makes it easier for them to change service providers, so quality absolutely matters.
Detecting and fixing issues before the customer even notices—this is no longer just a wish.
By leveraging big data and analytics, operations teams can now proactively see potential service impacting issues as they arise, develop prioritized plans of attack to address them, execute corrective actions and verify fixes without any customer complaints.
Are you ready to take your customers’ quality of experience to the next level?
EXFO has the expertise and solutions you need to become a data-driven, customer-focused operations team.
Challenges
Modern networks need to rely heavily on automation due to scale and complexity concerns. Automation, in turn relies heavily on analytics that can sort through a sea of data to find the hidden trends and issues that are causing unwanted behavior in the network: congestion, dropped calls, even equipment failures. And in a virtual network, some of these issues are only detectable by correlating many small changes in seemingly unrelated performance indicators.
Having the right data and understanding the full impact will be critical to effective operations in the transformed network.
Solutions
Networks are in transition. SDN and NFV will completely change the way networks are planned, built and managed. At the same time, carriers continue to experience attrition in their pool of skilled, experienced personnel and for some carriers, many of these positions may not be backfilled.
Data-driven operations allow carriers to change their operation paradigm, enabling their shrinking, younger workforce to ‘do more with less’.
Having the right data combined with actionable, policy-driven insight is critical to successfully managing this transformation.
Operations teams are being driven to cut expenses, make better decisions, shorten the time taken to identify and resolve issues—basically, do more with less. And at the same time, they need to make sure customer satisfaction remains high. Data-driven operations are essential to meeting these goals. Having the right information, at the right time to make the right decision will drive efficiencies throughout the organization. Do you have the right systems in place to be a data-driven operations team?
For data-driven operations to be successful you need data. Specifically you need a broad range of key performance indicators for services, networks and customers. Active probing solutions are the best way to derive end-to-end service KPIs while passive methods such as SNMP polling are good for getting equipment and network KPIs. Derived KPI metrics, such as a mean opinion score (MOS), provide good insight into the customer’s experience.
When deriving service metrics using active probing, it is becoming more and more critical to have one-way metrics which provide an independent view of the transmit and receive directions. Many services are highly asymmetric in nature and therefore may not experience the same delay in both directions. Additionally, in SDN networks, there’s no guarantee that the transmit and receive direction will follow the same path.
EXFO has an extensive portfolio of active probing solutions, both physical and virtual, as well as the tools and systems to gather, correlate and analyze network, service and customer KPIs from many sources, including 3rd party devices.