Visibility into OTT Traffic

To support their customer’s constantly growing use of Over The Top (OTT) content, network operators are distributing content acquisition and caching toward the edge of their networks, and working with CDN providers to bring more content on-net. Now more than ever, visibility into Over The Top (OTT) traffic is imperative for network operators to optimize the usage of available network capacity, maintain a quality user experience, reduce costs and increase revenue. But gaining this level of visibility at scale comes with two main challenges:

Traditional network telemetry (e.g. Netflow) provides scalable, cost-effective layer 3/4 visibility, but lacks the visibility into the service layer.
Mapping traffic onto OTT services is complicated by the many and varied delivery mechanisms. e.g. a single CDN node delivering content for multiple services.

Today’s Internet is services driven. As rapid and efficient delivery of content has become increasingly important, content location is often de-coupled from the content owner and being provided by CDN and cloud services instead.

How NETSCOUT Helps

NETSCOUT’s Smart Visibility solution consists of NETSCOUT’s ISNG, Arbor Sightline and Arbor Insight. Smart Visibility combines and correlates layer 3/4 Netflow and BGP telemetry with packet-derived DNS data to provide the ultimate in scalable service layer visibility.

With NETSCOUT Smart Visibility You Can:

Gain accurate visibility into the OTT services being accessed across any network, at any scale.
Understand ’who’ uses ‘what’ service, ‘where’, and ‘how’ service traffic crosses the network.
- Optimize network utilization to reduce costs and improve customer experience.
- Identify new revenue opportunities and partnerships.

Visualize and report traffic utilization with unrestricted multi-dimensional filters over any time period using any combination of facets.

Maximize the value of collected data.
- Utilize Business Intelligence for custom reporting, interactive dashboards etc..
- Export data to data lakes for integration with third—party tools and datasets

The infusion of NETSCOUT’s Smart DNS Data with NETSCOUT Arbor Insight enables operators to accurately identify the OTT services used by customers and businesses, providing greater insight into the value their network delivers.

With NETSCOUT Smart Visibility

Traditional Visibility

In this traffic flow we can see connections from customers through our peers and out to the destination. Without OTT visibility, we can only see Akamai (CDN) as the destination but are unable to determine or classify the traffic in any meaningful way beyond that:

With Arbor Sightline OTT Visibility

However, with Arbor Sightline’s OTT visibility we can identify and classify the traffic regardless of its destination. Here we can further identify a number of streaming video providers all behind a single CDN: