Ensure Trending Key Performance Indicators for 5G Services

The Opportunity

During scheduled probe maintenance, the network operations team of a Tier 1 North American mobile operator discovered that rebooting their probe resulted in a lack of visibility into critical key performance indicators (KPIs) for the session and policy management functions of the 5G N7 interface on their 5G Stand Alone (SA) network. This also limited their ability to discover and analyze call/leg records in the context of end-through-end session analysis.

The Details

After an evaluation of the issues, the NETSCOUT® team determined that the problem was caused by a corrupted dynamic table and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket breakdown upon probe restart. To resolve these issues and ensure trending KPIs during probe reboot, the team utilized nGeniusONE® and applied a heuristic decoding solution to compel TCP socket establishment on the N7 interface. This solution prevented the loss of KPI details. Otherwise, the TCP socket would have been opened for 10 days after probe reboot resulting in the loss of KPI tracking until a new TCP socket is established, 10 days later. The team also added a dynamic indexing method for consistent upkeep of the static and dynamic tables to avoid table corruption and to heuristically correct the decompression of the HTTP2 header.

The Results

NETSCOUT Solution Provided:

Network Operations team with full visibility into the N7 Interface, regardless of probe maintenance status.
KPI reporting on N7 performance and insights that improved Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).
Improved OPEX by eliminating TCP socket establishment wait time.