Accelerating the Move to NFV and Cloud Infrastructure with Confidence 

Keeping with the industry trend, a large African mobile operator experienced exponential traffic growth driven by video and OTT traffic on their network in which they saw subscriber data double each year. It became apparent that investing in current, traditional network infrastructure was no longer cost-effective. Accordingly, a revised business model and budget restraints drove their decision to accelerate their move toward implementing NFV and Cloud technologies to reduce CAPEX and OPEX. As a result they needed to find a performance monitoring and service assurance solution for their increasingly virtualized or hybrid network. 

Their Network Operations and Engineering teams were looking for a service assurance solution that would meet the following conditions:

• Provide visibility to NFV/Cloud infrastructure for proactive monitoring and service triage
• Provide a seamless workflow for both legacy/traditional networks and NFV/Cloud
• Software based solution that was optimized for the cloud
• Support for carrier class traffic, scaling to meet traffic growth
• Provide smart data that was extensible to business analytics 
• Provided a cost effective, software model for both COTS and cloud applications

The customer selected NETSCOUT’s InfiniStreamNG probe instrumentation which is available in COTS and the pure software versions of vSCOUT and vSTREAM to provide Network Operations and Engineering with a means to monitor the network during their hybrid journey. NETSCOUT’s service assurance solution for virtualization was selected because it offered cost-effective technology to support their future network rollout. It provided Network Operations and Engineering with holistic visibility and seamless usability of one monitoring system for multiple networks which saved OPEX for troubleshooting applications and offered proactive monitoring along the transformation to NFV/Cloud. 

With nGeniusONE the mobile operator was able to set up multiple dashboards to monitor new NFV and cloud infrastructure along with service oriented dashboards to ensure that the new technology was operating within design parameters and delivering desired quality of service. The service oriented dashboards provided an end-to-end view, keeping critical handover points (cloud to legacy infrastructure) in focus, and assuring key services and service enablers throughout the service chain.

Along with these dashboards, service monitors enabled Network Operations and Engineering to proactively monitor services delivered through the cloud and take early action based on service degradations. With this early warning system, the mobile operator was able to take early action on service degradations and minimize calls to customer support as well as customer dissatisfaction. 

To provide insights and analytics in support of new cloud services the mobile operator utilized a KAFKA (streaming) data feed of the smart data produced by vSCOUT and vSTREAM and the COTS versions of InfiniStreamNG. This rich, real-time metadata feeds existing business analytics tools and is available for security assurance as well. This smart data contains information on every subscriber session, network infrastructure and services utilized along with the user experience. It is easily accessible and consumable with NETSCOUT’s nGenius Business Analytics or another 3rd party business intelligence application.

NETSCOUT’s service assurance solution for virtualization helped this African mobile operator accelerate their move to NFV and Cloud infrastructure with confidence that they would maintain service levels. While virtualization was a major disruption to their network NETSCOUT’s solution did not disrupt their Network Operations and Engineering teams. vSCOUT and vSTREAM delivered smart data to meet the needs of this mobile operator for service assurance, business analytics and security assurance with software optimized for the cloud. And finally, NETSCOUT’S future ready solution reduced their service assurance budget CAPEX by 2/3 and OPEX by 1/3.

To learn more visit the NETSCOUT NVF Smarter page