Harnessing the Power of IP Data for NetOps, SecOps, and AIOps

As networks become increasingly complex, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have their hands full ensuring that performance meets subscriber needs and that security is up to snuff. The rollout of 5G and the push to monetize new cloud and edge capabilities has placed tremendous demands on NetOps, SecOps, and AIOps teams, who are tasked with troubleshooting network operations, ensuring security operations, and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) projects.

The IP data CSPs rely on for observability is essential for security and next-gen projects, because it is the most effective at reflecting the customer experience. Using this data to the fullest for multiple purposes, even going beyond operations into marketing and other business teams, makes good sense.

For example, IP data is highly effective at helping CSPs understand the 4G and 5G network voice experience, allowing NetOps teams to drill down into performance problems. These can include identifying voice service issues by location, device, and cause; determining the number of subscribers impacted; detecting problematic handsets on 5G New Radio (NR); identifying potential for upgrades, and determining whether Evolved Packet System (EPS) fallback is working properly. All of these metrics are essential to monitoring voice quality and ensuring a superior customer experience.

The Need for Intelligent Automation: Going Beyond Human Capabilities

Visibility and automation are needed to secure and assure services across a CSP’s infrastructure and applications. Without automation, NetOps can struggle to pinpoint an issue, taking multiple days of work by multiple technicians.

SecOps can face equally daunting challenges in responding to threats to the network in a timely manner. Automation can systematically monitor to see if there are heavy users of the network or Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which may be indicative of hacking activities. Being able to identify heavy users can expose security risks or other performance risks that hold the potential to impact other users on the same node or market. Automation and AI can also discover risks associated with applications, raising security flags that SecOps can prioritize.

Automated observability is key to key performance indicator (KPI) analysis, which can replace tedious and time-consuming tasks and enable the more efficient use of highly skilled resources. Employing AI and machine learning (ML) empowers NetOps, SecOps, and AIOps teams to discover what humans alone can’t. AI/ML can facilitate multiprotocol analysis to filter out noise, execute outlier detection, and conduct deep analytics, as well as perform multidimensional cross correlation to identify hidden patterns.

As the complexity of networks increases exponentially, the need for intelligent automation, combined with deep domain knowledge in multiple disciplines, will be crucial for success. By leveraging automation and extensive domain expertise, CSPs can achieve important benefits, such as elevating and escalating troubleshooting, achieving critical cost savings, accelerating time to market for new services, addressing a lack of skilled resources, and ensuring an excellent customer experience.

AIOps Empowered by Smart Data

As CSPs look to expand use cases, AIOps teams face a common problem: siloed data. All too often, the Radio Access Network (RAN) team uses its data from the RAN, while the core network team leverages data from the core. And neither group tends to share its respective data.

Without this shared data, AIOps teams are hampered in efforts to innovate around SLA management, fraud prevention, traffic planning, marketing, and much more. A better approach is for AIOps to have an end-to-end set of data from the device to the RAN to the edge, access layer, and through the core network. This kind of network visibility can be vital in achieving Wi-Fi assurance via AI/ML advanced analytics, as well as voice assurance and a host of other next-gen objectives. NETSCOUT Smart Data can empower AIOps teams to enhance projects by using direct user experience.

Domain Expertise + AI Automation

When it comes to marrying AI automation and domain expertise for superior network visibility and intelligence, no one does it better than NETSCOUT. The Omnis Analytics solution combines nearly 40 years of domain knowledge packaged with AI/ML to monitor signaling and media, providing unparalleled mobility intelligence. This innovative solution is flexible, cloud native, and offers microservice-based architecture for the collection of analytics chains.

NetOps, SecOps, and AIOps teams can benefit from the Smart Data generated by NETSCOUT, providing direct user-experience information that CSPs can use for ensuring a superior customer experience, enhancing security, and advancing AI service innovation. One of the many benefits of this advanced technology is that it is self-learning and can adapt to the trends it is uncovering, providing actionable intelligence to achieve smart outcomes.

Learn more about NETSCOUT Automation and the effective actions it fuels.