Use-cases for Active Assurance: Active test automation in the 5G+cloud era
Communication service provider (CSP) operations and assurance are continuing to be more and more automated to meet new service quality requirements that are crucial to leading in the 5G and cloud era. It is now more important than ever before to be very accurate about measuring service quality. Monitoring now needs to be highly fine-grained and proactively measuring so that issues are caught as they emerge and before they impact customer services.
Active Assurance is becoming a hot topic in service and network operations for exactly this reason; because it automates active testing across all the network domains that deliver connectivity for end-to-end customer services. It offers a service-centric solution for measuring quality of experience from public and private clouds, all the way to end-users and devices.
In their white paper (1) entitled “Automated assurance is key to the automation of 5G and SD-WAN operations,” key industry analyst firm, Analysys Mason recommends that “CSPs should embrace automated operations powered by automated assurance to succeed in their digital transformation initiatives, and to operationalise 5G and SD-WAN at scale. Active testing automation provides an opportunity to automate testing for NFV/SDN and cloud-native digital networks as well as existing physical networks.”
Today’s tools do not provide service quality visibility end to end across the whole delivery chain, but rather offer siloed monitoring for various domains with blind spots because of internal and partner networks and clouds that are not within operations' scope of management. Even with fast and robust telemetry collection, data aggregation lakes and network analytics, there is still a major issue in that it is extremely difficult to feed in all the right data required from all the devices which application service traffic passes through.
However, active assurance is the game changer to delivering the needed visibility and automation. It works by measuring end to end service quality through actively sending a small amount of traffic on the data plane to simulate an end user.
Analysys Mason states that “Active testing data enriches the assurance platform and increases the quality of network insights that are key to automating assurance processes and closed-loop automation via network orchestration systems. Active testing automation helps CSPs to offer on-demand services and deliver a superior customer experience by proactively identifying network and service issues before they affect the customer.”
Active assurance provides a straightforward approach that can provide immediate results whether you have an existing modern service assurance framework or not.
Learning about the key active assurance use-cases when augmenting automated assurance solutions is important towards gaining an understanding of the value that automated active testing can provide. Use-cases highlighted by Analysys Mason in their white paper are as follows:
1. Need to validate new VNFs
Inherently, cloud-based digital networks will be highly dynamic. New VNFs will be implemented due to the changing demands of the customer and network capacity requirements. Active testing enables the validation and certification of VNFs as they are implemented.
2. Need for continuous, proactive monitoring of services
Certain services such as connected home or smart metering IoT services require extremely reliable connectivity and high performance, but may only be used sporadically. In these cases, active testing capabilities enable the continuous monitoring of the network, service availability and performance, even when services are not being used (for example, IoT sensors that issue alarms and emergency services).
3. Validating services across multi-operator networks
Complex multi-cloud services that run across multiple provider network clouds need to be proactively monitored across the end-to-end service. Active testing delivers unique value when the service provider does not necessarily own all parts of the end-to-end network
4. Need for advanced fault isolation
Hybrid networks consisting of legacy and NFV/SDN components will be highly complex. The ability to test individual segments in a controlled, coherent manner will be required for the rapid, automated isolation of performance degradations across the end-to-end digital network.
5. Need to automate change management
Failure to thoroughly test and validate changes before switching on services can cause outages, resulting in significant monetary loss and brand value erosion. Making automated active testing an integral part of change management processes can alleviate some of the associated risks. It is even more essential in digital networks as the changes can occur on short notice.
6. Test and turn up automation for service upgrades
Active testing must support new services that are being introduced in today’s physical networks even as digital networks are being rolled out. For example, 100GbE networks are supported by virtual active testing technology.
7. Validate services over hybrid networks
Validating hybrid services that span the legacy physical and virtual network domains will probably require a combination of physical and virtual active test agents.
8. Monitor QoS of transport networks
It is crucial for the performance of 5G services that the transport networks consisting of backhaul, mid-haul and fronthaul perform well. These networks need to be ready before the new 5G cell sites and the core are commissioned.
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Learn more about how you can use active assurance to achieve these use-cases by moving to a proactive, service-centric operations model that puts your customers in focus. For more information, read our Juniper Networks Paragon Active Assurance white paper on “Service assurance in the 5G and cloud era.”
Related Articles:
· Juniper Blog: Active Assurance Improves Network Service Quality
· Converged! Network Digest Blueprint: Green network quality makes services operators happy
· FierceTelecom: Experience-first networking means proactively testing with active assurance
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(1) Analysys Mason, “Automated assurance is key to the automation of 5G and SD-WAN operations,” March 2019.