Accanto: Network monitoring and testing should move toward 'adaptive customer service assurance'

Service providers must forge new, more “adaptive” approaches to networking monitoring and testing, closely tying network and application performance to the overall customer experience in ways that legacy networks could not but that new IP networks and today’s competitive marketplace require.

“The overarching buzz still revolves around customer experience management, with assurance still linked to network monitoring for troubleshooting and how it all relates to a certain customer experience,” said Paolo Trevisan, vice president of marketing for Accanto, which recently released a white paper entitled, "Adaptive Customer Service Assurance (CSA) for Service Providers,” detailing these new requirements.

According to Trevisan, operators must pursue three approaches to customer service assurance: a network-centric approach that focuses on network nodes and resources tied to performance; a customer-centric approach that collects network information to identify and recognize different tiers of customers; and now, with the explosion of mobile data, an application-centric approach where different requirements for various services are sought to understand performance and quality.

All of these approaches rely on tools for examining CDRs (call detail records) to determine customer views or deep-packet inspection for looking at services and applications carried inside the user plane.

The “adaptive customer service assurance” concept promulgates an integration of those two approaches so that all data can be consolidated into one data repository for the slicing and dicing of information and applications according to whatever needs or trends have to be answered to at the time.

"Managing the enrichment of information requires that operators collect data from different points in their networks, and then that they enrich it into metadata or xDRs. They should be able to perform correlations of multiple dimensions with information residing in records, such as customer identities, access point nodes, and services, measurements of quality, device information, and so on,” said Trevisan.

Smart devices generating many more user sessions on higher-bandwidth mobile networks require operators to seek ways to sift through enormous amounts of data with different perspectives, Trevisan said.

“You need a distributed monitoring system with probes, and you need to distribute intelligence closer to monitoring points so you can pre-process enriched information in the probes themselves and then use software and enablers in central management system for enrichment and correlation. That enrichment depends on the right ‘map’ or ‘view’ of what you need in your network," Trevisan said.

The ability to provide different views (customer, network or application centric) of data means information has to be collected (resource, customer and service) through real-time dashboards so that operators have insightful and flexible views of information according to the most relevant perspective. “The analogy of various overlaying maps is a useful way to think about the adaptive approach. With adaptive customer service assurance, operators should be able to select a number of dashboards, structure them over different layers and display the most relevant information along different perspectives and axes," Trevisan said.

According to Trevisan, carriers like Telefonica 02 in Germany and Vodafone in the Czech Republic are using adaptive approaches to arbitrarily combine various aspects of network, device, service and customer-oriented monitoring, thus moving toward ensuring maximum network/service performance.