By
Manuel Stopnicki
One of the key trends in today’s marketplace is the recognition that service providers are undergoing a major transformation of their business. While much of their revenue continues to come from providing the traditional pipeline, the market is also demanding an ever-growing range of new services such as VoIP, teleconferencing, and audio and video data streaming—applications that by their nature carry high bandwidth requirements, as well as specific performance requirements. Because these applications require a more costly and complex infrastructure, service providers find themselves in a difficult balancing act. They must garner new revenue out of existing bandwidth with the new critical applications, but at the same time they must meet the high quality of experience (QoE) customers demand when using them.
All of this leads to an ever-growing need for true traffic awareness. As service providers become more and more application-centric, they have an increasing requirement for effective, real-time visibility into network infrastructure, as well as at the application level for better traffic monitoring and improved control of what is going on and over their network.
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Service providers find themselves in a difficult balancing act. |
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The requirements for true traffic awareness are twofold; the first is to be able to analyze traffic trends as well as the abnormalities that occur in real time. Active monitoring technologies provide a cost effective way to get a sense of the network performance at the IP level by injecting fake transactions. But to really understand the customer experience, one must analyze each individual real end-user transaction. These transactions are often recorded in pieces of data called IP Detail Records (IPDR) or more generally xPDR. xPDR can be produced by the network equipments themselves (Call Managers for instance) or by
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Achieving True Traffic Awareness
True traffic awareness can be defined as enabling a manager or operator to truly “see” infrastructure utilization as it happens and the application’s QoE in a fully integrated, holistic platform that enables the operator to go beyond monitoring network traffic to being able to proactively manage the network. Unless the entire delivery chain is managed proactively, a problem in any one area can create immediate performance impacts for end-users. Additionally, unless the impact of a new application on the overall network is well understood and planned for, it can compromise the quality of other critical network services.
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Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) probes. DPI is a technology that ensures real-time monitoring of all IP flows and supplies the details of each communication, the protocol used, the port number, the client and server addresses, as well as automatic recognition of the application or service being exchanged. By analyzing those records in real-time, one can get an intimate understanding of how the network is used and of the true customer experience.
The second requirement for achieving true traffic awareness is having the ability to correlate this information within the context of the network infrastructure on a single platform.
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