Service assurance and quality insights are among the foremost drivers of profitability for service providers; however, testing and monitoring from an end-user perspective using traditional, resource-focused assurance solutions is practically impossible as the connection between the network resources and the service consumed by the end-user cannot be accurately defined. To further complicate matters for service providers, networks are becoming increasingly software-defined and dynamic, with frequent updates and changes, workload relocation and resource sharing.

Customers today also expect immediate and flawless service turn-up. This expectation creates high demands to deliver the service “right the first time.” To achieve this goal of agile, assured service creation and delivery, active testing must be an integral part of the service provisioning process.

In addition to these challenges, today’s bandwidth- and media-intensive services require a consistently high level of quality. An inability to monitor and assure end-to-end service quality from the end-user’s perspective will lead to customer dissatisfaction and churn. Active, multilayer monitoring is therefore required to gain real-time insights into service quality.

To address the challenges that service providers are facing with service assurance in existing and emerging networks, the concept of Orchestrated Assurance was developed together with Cisco in ETSI NFV PoC #36. The model-driven Orchestrated Assurance methodology is designed to bridge the gap between service fulfillment and assurance, where end-to-end activation tests and monitoring scenarios are defined at the service design stage and automated throughout the full service lifecycle in closed-feedback loops.

Learn more about the challenges Orchestrated Assurance solves in our whitepaper with Cisco below.