Next-Generation Service Assurance with NeSA Powered by AWS

By Dibyendu Dey, Associate Director – Prodapt
By Albeda Siddique, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS

Prodapt

As networks are becoming hybrid and complex, the need for a single platform to manage them in a simplified way becomes essential. Conventional solutions are often proprietary and serve specific functions, and these individual components are tightly coupled with their in-house components.

Telcos are spending a lot of money to customize to build specific use cases. They’re facing various challenges to manage their diversified, complex, and hybrid networks efficiently while looking for a vendor-agnostic, scalable, flexible, cloud-native, and cost-effective solution.

In this post, we are going to cover Prodapt’s experience in delivering artificial intelligence (AI)-driven network monitoring capabilities for a tier 1 telco operator using Prodapt’s open source-based platform which utilizes AWS-native services.

The network assurance platform (NeSA) collects data from multiple original equipment manufacturer (OEM) vendors and provides insights on events, alarms, and performance for better correlation and root-cause assessment. This can have an immediate impact on mean time to resolve (MTTR), self-remediation, and automation, with preventive steps to improve quality of services on both the customer and network side.

NeSA provides a one-stop solution for service providers or telcos to manage their network smartly with the help of open-source technologies enabled through Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides a single-pane-of-glass view with integrated monitoring, diagnosis, automation, analytics, and AI capabilities.

Prodapt is an AWS Specialization Partner with the Telecom Services Competency and an exclusive focus in the communication, media, and entertainment (CME) industry. Prodapt offers services for digital, network, customer experience, and operations transformation programs.

Key Challenges for Telcos

For telcos, triage, incident response, and root cause analysis can be complex during and after a major outage because of different business domains, devices, and application team involvement. The network operations team, for example, faces challenges while troubleshooting outages due to a lack of predictive alerts, which can cause a deep level of impact across multiple systems.

Service providers are searching for an efficient platform to manage their network complexities and simplify operational processes, which is vendor-agonistic, scalable, flexible, cloud-native, and cost effective.

Following are key challenges across various service providers who operates across geographies:

• Lack of agility: All service providers have their internalized and complex business processes, which require customization, and out-of-the-box propitiatory solutions require heavy customization to build such use cases. Service providers are looking for a flexible solution to build templatized use cases and are ready to adopt new technologies.
• Lack of visibility: There are limitations to getting an end-to-end view of the entire network, drilling down to the atomic level by correlating functional components and data underneath it. There are proprietary solutions to bring key functional components together but unable to fulfil all requirements.
• Complex integration: Market-leading solutions from independent software vendors (ISVs) are typically proprietary and address specific use cases. This results in cross-platform integrations, alignment, and dependencies.

Untangling Complexities from Conventional Approach

Telcos are looking for a simplistic yet powerful solution through which they can visualize the end-to-end network with converged all key service assurance capabilities under one umbrella as a single platform.

This post walks through how telcos can address the key challenges to create a robust solution framework with a set of network service assurance areas.

First, telcos require full control of the platform to customize per business requirements and fully manage business processes without any additional cost overhead. The platform should be adaptable and scalable to onboard different domains and provide a seamless user experience.

A cloud-native platform using open-source technologies with the flexibility to support various use cases is ideal, and should provide a single-pane-of-glass view for the entire network with various service assurance functions.

Finally, the platform should improve various KPIs, such as Right First Time (RFT), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), number of automatic incident creation, number of automatic fault resolution, and many others in the service assurance area.

Leveraging NeSA for Next-Gen Service Assurance Capabilities

The reference architecture for NeSA is based on TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and is in alignment with ETSI Zero-Touch Network and Service Assurance (ZSM).

The NeSA deployment architecture on AWS (shown in Figure 1) includes all of the relevant services that are needed for setting up the environment. This includes all key features of network assurance functions, including data collection and correlation, messaging bus, fault engine, inventory discovery, workflow manager, and more.

Figure 1 – Next-gen service assurance deployment on AWS.

Prodapt used a combination of AWS cloud-native services as well as commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) and open-source (OSS) tools. Most of the components were deployed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

For data collection and visualization, Prodapt primarily relied on Prometheus and Grafana. Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and Amazon MSK Connect were used for communication between different components.

This architecture allowed Prodapt to build a strategic platform that supported autoscaling, high availability, and fault tolerance. Previously, the team had been using standalone Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, each with a collector application deployed on them.

However, as the number of devices from which were scraping data increased, Prodapt had to upscale the EC2 instances—by utilizing Amazon MSK and Amazon EKS, the team was able to progress with confidence.

Solution Highlights

NeSA is an ideal platform for next-gen service assurance, offering a wide range of capabilities:

• Provides a comprehensive framework for service assurance functions, with pre-built use cases for fault, performance, inventory, discovery, analytics, and other functions.
• Enables faster onboarding of advanced use cases for automation workflow, proactive and predictive analytics, and AI/ML through specialized solutions.
• Supports deep diagnostics of network events and troubleshooting to find the root cause using a specialized solution called Network Analyzer.
• Enables closed-loop automation by coordinating with the orchestration platform and enabling a self-healing network.
• Flexibility to adopt any conventional service assurance functions and gradually take over responsibilities. The solution can be deployed in modules or full scope based on the service provider’s requirements.
• Domain- and vendor-agnostic, scalable, and fully customizable.
• Enables a single-pane-of-glass view of the entire network through NeSA Topology Engine dashboards. This provides an end-to-end view of the network topology, allowing for drill-down views to detail reports of events, alarms, performance logs, and more.

Figure 2 – Topology of XGS-PON network through single-pane-of-glass view.

Implementation for Tier 1 Service Provider Environment

NeSA offers more than 300 pre-built, reusable, templatized use cases for various service assurance functions, including fault, capacity, performance, security, network topology, self-diagnosis, analytics, automation, AI/ML, and more.

The following example provides a brief explanation of a typical customer’s challenges, solution approach, and benefits realized.

Customer Challenges

• Long turnaround time while troubleshooting outages due to the involvement of multiple systems, applications, and different vendors/business teams. This added difficulty to finding events/signals out of the noise.
• Absence of a vendor-agnostic, multi-cloud, single platform with end-to-end network assurance capabilities.

Solution Approach

• Cloud-native platform that provides a unified comprehensive view of a diversified network, with integrated diagnosis, monitoring, analytics, and automation.
• Network data visualization and deep insights into its performance stats that allows for troubleshooting, optimization, and remediation of issues. The platform also recommends proactive changes (closed-loop automation) that can be applied to the network automatically.
• Implementation includes leveraging pre-built, reusable asset libraries for faster rollouts across various network functions. These libraries cover fault, performance, and network topology functions across fixed, mobile, and wireless networks, as well as multiple technologies.

Benefits

• Improvement in incident resolution times.
• Faster reduction in incident volumes through proactive and preventive monitoring, as well as alerting.
• Reduction in operational costs when implementing digital assurance with automated event/alarm correlation and automated root cause analyses.
• Ability to turn up end-to-end service for any new customers within a two-week timeframe, down from the previous month’s timeframe.

Conclusion

Prodapt collaborated with AWS to implement the NeSA framework that acts as a one-stop network service assurance and observability solution that enables the monitoring and management of all network elements. It’s highly customizable and allows telcos to tailor the solution to specific needs and provide a seamless customer experience.

The framework offers flexibility in selecting technologies, including cloud-native services, pure-play COTS, or a combination of both, to support telcos’ journey towards next-gen service assurance.

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Prodapt – AWS Partner Spotlight

Prodapt is an AWS Specialization Partner with an exclusive focus in the communication, media, and entertainment industry. Prodapt offers services for digital, network, customer experience, and operations transformation programs.

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