by Stefan Vallin, PhD in Network Management, Senior PLM, Juniper Networks
As we all have been hunkered down in our homes throughout the pandemic, many of us have been trying to make the best of a horrible situation and some of us have taken on new pursuits to keep our minds active. Where possible, some of us are trying to live as actively as we can during these hard times, perhaps we have reconnected with the outdoors and nature? Whether it be walking, hiking, cycling or gardening, there is something about fresh air and the greenery of the world that has comforted many of us. For me, it has been an active interest in my green house for both gardening and contemplation. There is something about it that allows me to feel very free and focused on something that brings me a little bit of happiness in an otherwise chaotic world of networking and service assurance. (Watch my video below on this topic from my greenhouse.)
Having studied service assurance for my doctorate and working across many roles in the industry with this focus, I recently have reflected on how this anxiety-reducing feeling of “green” comfort is so applicable to service operators. Green network quality makes service operators and their telecom customers happy. It’s just a fact!
But why are telecom’s customers not happy? It’s because when it comes to network quality, services have been far from green. We at Juniper Networks have researched that in the Service Provider industry, the Telecom NPS (Net Promoter Score) is roughly half that of any other industry.
So lately I’ve been thinking about this and how things are actually just getting worse. First, there is today’s drastically increased requirements on network quality, both in the case of businesses and home end-users that cannot live without a high performing network. Secondly, there is tomorrow’s promise of 5G which rotates around high-quality services that are ultra-reliable with ultra-low latencies. So 5G is very much connected to networks becoming critical when it comes to performance, which is tightly coupled with the classic concept of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Of course, this may sound like an outdated topic that has been around for decades, but with the cloud and 5G era, it is time to revisit the SLA topic as a key focal point of what we do in the networking industry!
The revenge of SLAs
If we look at SLAs, and what specifically is sold to both broadband and business customers, all communications service providers tout their high quality of experience and bandwidth guarantees, along with network performance that delivers extremely fast response times while minimizing loss, latency and jitter. However, when we go to monitor these services in the service operations center, we see mostly that device health is being monitored in terms of alarms and performance counters from infrastructure that are not specifically related to the individual customer services. This is a very device-centric approach. And although this information may make services appear green, it does not really show service operators that they are indeed meeting SLAs and keeping customers happy.
So how are service operators showing customers that they are meeting contracted SLAs then? The process of many operators is to track ticket resolution times for fixing outages and well as outage hours. However, bad performance over time and intermittent issues are a bigger problem than blackouts: they are harder to detect and they impact customers over a long time. In fact, in today’s hyper competitive landscape, when customers are not satisfied with their services it has been studied that 95% of them leave without even complaining. But not only that, they also tell others and boast about the new deal they got with your competitor!
The cause of this poor customer experience is actually known, and untested network changes not being caught in time are costing dearly economically at the tune of billions, with dramatic negative impact to reputation and customer retention.
It is such a high cost, when the change we need in the industry is fairly simple and at a low cost of ownership. The shift we need is as easy as moving away from the device-centric approach and taking on a service-centric approach by actively testing end-to-end network quality. To achieve true SLA guarantees, we need to start monitoring network quality key performance indicators (KPIs). This needs to be measured at the data-plane while most monitoring solutions are looking at the management plane for insights. It is exactly this missing element that service operators need to enable services to be truly green and deliver experiences that delight customers.
Active Assurance is the missing piece for improving service operations
Looking at the typical assurance stack, most operations rely of a mix of solutions. Typically, a fault and event management system presents volumes of alarms that show you if any devices are broken, answering questions such as “Is the interface up or down?” Important, but it does not tell you service health. Secondly, we have performance monitoring systems that look at the overall network health, answering questions such as “How are my links utilized?” We also have passive probes that give a centralized understanding of traffic flows in the network and what protocols are enabled, answering questions such as “What types of traffic are in my network and how does this traffic flow?”
All of these solutions are needed within service operations, but fail to deliver the service-centric approach needed to truly measure and guarantee end-to-end network quality for your services.
The missing is piece is called “Active Assurance”.
Meet Active Assurance
Active assurance provides a straightforward approach that can provide immediate results whether you have an existing modern service assurance framework or not. 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.
With active assurance, you can easily and cost-effectively deploy a solution that will enable you to automate proactive testing and monitoring on the real-time data plane and locate emerging issues before customers are impacted. When your services are actively assured, you will be able to guarantee service quality for your services. This service-centric approach will also enable your service and network operations teams to ensure that all network changes are made right the first time and right all the time.
So make your service operators and customers happy by delivering truly green network quality with active assurance! Read our Juniper Networks Paragon Active Assurance white paper on “Service assurance in the 5G and cloud era” to learn more about how you can use it to achieve a proactive, service-centric operations model that puts your customers in focus.
