Orchestrated Assurance:Closed-loop Automated Troubleshooting and Healing
What if you could automatically verify that each provisioned service works when delivered and continues to work throughout its lifetime?
Operations suffers from the gap between service fulfillment and service assurance. Services are provisioned and changed without the assurance systems and operations teams being aware of the service. In many cases the assurance teams even have to deal with incomplete and incorrect deliveries.
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 Orchestrated Assurance pattern addresses physical, hybrid and virtual networks.
The principles are the following:
- Service activation must include a service activation test; a service is not fully provision until tested. The test should correspond to how the service is sold and used.
- Service activation must include configuration of active service monitoring according to the promised SLA.
- Any configuration changes of the service should be re-tested according to the first point above. The changes should be propagated to the ongoing SLA monitoring.
- Any SLA violations detected by the ongoing SLA monitoring should be forwarded to an automation engine in order to enable automated troubleshooting and healing.
Business VPN demonstration
Closed-loop Automated Troubleshooting and Healing
Model-driven Orchestrated Assurance offers Service Providers a new approach to bridge the gap between service fulfillment and assurance. Software-based Test Agents, which are well-suited to a dynamic network environment, perform end-to-end activation tests and active monitoring that are automated throughout the full service lifecycle in closed-feedback loops. This enables Service Providers to automatically validate SLAs, discover issues earlier (and BEFORE their customers), and resolve problems more quickly.
Download the whitepaper from Cisco and Netrounds and learn more about the business impact and ROI of Orchestrated Assurance below!
“Integrating the Netrounds active testing and monitoring component with a proven orchestration system will allow increased agility for faster delivery of assured services and to take advantage of new business opportunities more quickly. Automatically verifying delivery of service quality as expected by customers will be of critical importance for staying competitive today and in the dynamic, software-defined environment of tomorrow.”
– Patrick Waldemar, Vice President and Head of Technology, Telenor Research
Benefits of Orchestrated Assurance
Actively verify services work after provisioned by
Cisco NSO
Generate real-world traffic to ensure services are delivered correctly before they are exposed to end users and deliver birth certificates to key stakeholders.
Reduce manual and field test efforts
Automate test sequences and use remote troubleshooting to reduce manual field efforts, dispatching technicians to fix problems, not to find them.
Help ensure that provisioned services continue to work throughout their lifetime
Get service quality insights from the end-user perspective through active, real-time measurements.
Resolve problems faster
Take advantage of remote testing capabilities; automate advanced test scenarios through Cisco NSO; and test across layers, services, and domains.
Get started easily today
Netrounds’ components are easily installed and interwork with the network devices already deployed in your network. In addition, Cisco NSO has a prebuilt integration module to enable full Netrounds automation.
Request your one-on-one demo of Orchestrated Assurance.
What does the solution look like?
Cisco Orchestrated Assurance powered by Netrounds includes two main Netrounds components:
- Netrounds Control Center with relevant feature packs
- Netrounds Test Agents with active traffic-generation capabilities
To automate and orchestrate testing and monitoring through Netrounds Control Center using NSO, a prebuilt network element driver (NED) for NSO is used. In addition, Netrounds Test Agents can be dynamically deployed on virtualized compute hosts on demand.
Netrounds Control Center
Netrounds Control Center provides a graphical designer environment for developers to build activation testing templates and other automatable test sequences. NSO triggers these templates using the NETCONF and YANG API to achieve closed-loop automation.
The Netrounds Control Center GUI environment also presents test reports, alarms, and real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) of actual end-user experience through dashboards and drill-down charts. Ongoing monitoring with errored-second calculations and SLA compliance indicators are visible on the dashboard. The dynamic Test Agent inventory is also viewable in the Control Center, and Test Agents will automatically appear in the inventory when they are connected to the network using a call-home method.
Netrounds Test Agents
All testing and monitoring activities are performed using traffic-generating Netrounds Test Agents remotely located at strategic locations in your network.
Test Agents actively generate authentic traffic and analyze detailed, real-time measurements across multiple applications, services, and interfaces. Test Agents support concurrent measurement of network performance (UDP, TCP, Y.1731, and TWAMP), IPTV and OTT video, and the Internet (HTTP, ping, and Speedtest), as well as VoIP and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) telephony.
All Test Agents are centrally managed and updated from the Netrounds Control Center using an automated call-home mechanism.
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