Sandvine comes full circle, debuts traffic 'analytics'

When Sandvine debuted its Network Analytics solution a year ago (CP: Sandvine adds data analytics capabilities), the idea was to leverage its core IP packet inspection engine to reveal for operators what was really happening on their networks.

To that end, its first two analytics solutions – network summary and usage management – aimed to give operators a high-level view of what was happening on their networks. It was targeted more at product managers and the business office than network admins or planners – offering those users access to network usage data they’d lacked in the past.

This week, Sandvine debuted another analytics use case with its new Traffic Management Dashboard, this time letting the people who actually run the network get another view into network performance. The dashboard lets service providers monitor network congestion at a granular level and respond to ensure a high customer experience.

Network admins have typically relied on network probes and other traditional monitoring devices for those capabilities, with a focus on isolating and fixing specific network problems. Sandvine’s Traffic Management Dashboard works at a slightly higher level but aims to deliver similar, actionable intelligence. “It gets info out of the network and in front of admins in an easy to access format with clear findings and projections,” said Lee Brooks, Sandvine product marketing manager, in an interview.

Network managers and planners can also take that data – much of which wasn’t available with the same in the past, and certainly not sorted against financial data and other inputs in an integrated dashboard – and use it to make decisions about where to take the network next, Brooks said. For instance, the dashboard includes a Capacity Planning Calculator, which lets service providers optimize capacity investments while addressing the overall customer experience.

The Traffic Management Dashboard integrates with Sandvine’s Fairshare Traffic Management platform (CP: Sandvine enhances policy, reporting for Fairshare platform). Along with data it pulls from that packet inspection-based platform, Sandvine’s Network Analytics platform can pull in data from other network elements, including IPDR (Internet Protocol Detail Record) data, Sandvine’s Brooks said.

In addition to capacity planning, operators can use it to analyze resource utilization, creating a ‘watch list’ of heavily-loaded network elements. It can also be used to audit congestion management policies, to understand if they are working on the network. Finally, providers can also target analysis down to the subscriber level to understand an individual user’s impact on the network

Sandvine introduced the Traffic Management Dashboard at this week’s Cable Show in Chicago. It also views mobile operators as a key target for its analytics solutions, given the need for such carriers to manage exploding subscriber and device usage on their networks.