How to choose quality monitoring solution for IP Core Networks?
First start with the WHY
An IP core network is a critical, central and high-capacity communication facility between various sub-networks, typically represented as a mesh in the network topology. Now let’s imagine an issue in a part of the mesh network. Given that each link carries even terabytes of traffic, we get a large number of services and customers impacted. If not detected fast or pointed out by the customer (which is often the case), an issue like this can result in massive business and financial losses.
Knowing the cost of a mistake comes with penalties, churn and business expansion slowdown, one might wonder how is it possible for a service provider to not have monitoring solutions in place to see when something goes wrong in the network?!
What stands in the way?
To answer this, let’s step a little back to a thought experiment: Imagine you have a collection of pictures of sheep with a wolf among them also dressed as one. In this case the wolf represents a problem in the network mesh. If you go through the pictures too fast, or the quality of the pictures is not good enough, you might never be able to spot the problematic wolf. But if carefully scanned through, and you have a specific set of small features that you are looking for in a wolf, it’s not difficult to spot it. Likewise in networks where thousands of performance data points are continuously collected, it becomes very hard if not impossible to spot the issues if the data is coarse and lacks granularity.
To summarize everything above, network performance monitoring is not the challenge network providers should worry about, but rather monitoring inaccuracy and granularity which can be fixed by having the right network performance monitoring solution in place.
HOW to choose a network performance monitoring solution?
In this article we will focus not focus on the entire process, but rather the criteria for choosing the right network performance monitoring solution. If you are looking for the solution at the moment or need help with preparing a “Request for Information” from potential vendors:
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Criteria of choosing to consider:
- How easily can you go from big network picture and drill down into details?
- How interactive are the reports and dashboards?
- How easily can you set performance thresholds?
- Can you achieve under 1ms granularity in sampling rates?
- Can you see the status of your endpoints directly from the map in real time?
- Can you feed in your reporting and alert data into other systems?
- How fast and easy it is to deploy the monitoring solution? How much manual work is required?
- What types of service activation testing are available for you?
- How easy it is to introduce a new service, add measurements for new quality classes or expand the network?
- Does the solution work with KAFKA?
- Can you conduct end-to-end measurements both two-way and one-way?
- Is there a functionality to build customer dashboards and periodical automated performance reports?
To learn more about why this criteria is important and what PULSure solution can do for IP Core networks performance monitoring please check out this document: Solution Brief for IP Core Monitoring
Do you still want to read more, check this one:
3 things about your core network you should know
Fore more information on core networks read the article