Tool Consolidation

The majority of service assurance tools are designed to address either per-subscriber service monitoring, transport monitoring, or mobile infrastructure monitoring, but not all three at once. This results in a proliferation of tools, which makes assuring the end-user experience an increasingly difficult and expensive proposition.

To reduce recurrent capital and operational expenses, providers need to reconcile and consolidate overlapping tool functionalities to avoid the cost and delays associated with jumping between separate OSS toolsets. Instead of using tools that lack the ability to correlate actual service performance to the service and network topology, providers need a single, vendor-agnostic toolset that can address both end-to-end service and network management requirements, including subscriber awareness and transport monitoring.

Cross-Domain Troubleshooting

In today’s mobile environment, each mobile service demands a broader scope of operational support. To meet this challenge and ensure the delivery of expected QoE, providers need real-time monitoring and reporting of every infrastructure entity along the service delivery path—from data center to mobile packet core, to the IP/MPLS backbone, radio access network and the Ethernet backhaul. With this holistic and proactive view of the health of the network infrastructure and the services and applications traversing it, providers can understand the relationships between resources, the services they support and the respective performance indicators. This enables the provider to proactively drill-down to identify and address service degradations before they impact end users.

entities (both mobile and transport). Comprehensive visibility to proactively monitor performance and capacity all the way from the data center to the multi-generation radio access elements, including transport entities in the packet-based backhaul (that typically cause localized service experience issues), is critical for ensuring QoE for high-value enterprise accounts. With this comprehensive visibility, engineers and operational personnel have the information they need to make decisions about dedicating priority bandwidth as well as to analyze and prioritize application traffic in a way that helps ensure a high-quality end-user experience.

As more and more corporate applications switch to mobility solutions, such as increasing machine-to-machine (M2M) offerings, operators need to provide enterprises with visibility into their performance. Having the ability to provide custom reporting that verifies delivery of the level of service for which these corporate customers are paying will build trust and aid retention.