The Next Generation of Service Assurance:
The Imperative to Advance

Service assurance is the way organizations optimize various services offered over networks (from phone calls and email to video and applications) to deliver a better end-user experience.

For decades, service assurance practices used fragmented views of the network and services that are typically manually curated and often inaccurate. To compete and innovate, communication service providers and enterprise IT operations need a real-time, unified view of their infrastructure and network topology.



In this series, we’ll examine challenges in optimizing network services and describe how leading companies overcome them using graph database technology. This week, we’ll start with the trends driving major advances in service assurance.

The Imperative to Advance Service Assurance

Telecommunications and network operations have changed: network functions virtualization (NFV), software-defined networks (SDN) and significant automation – all intertwined with existing infrastructure. Service complexity is exploding.

Communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprise IT operations must go beyond reactive approaches with human intervention at each layer if they want to keep pace with the snowball of new services, tighter cross-domain dependencies and virtualized networks.

Coupled with increasing expectations and service levels, this is pushing organizations to advance their service assurance to include a holistic, accurate and real-time view of the network.

Consequently, CSPs and IT teams are looking for scalable, nimble solutions and deep expertise to help them transform and thrive in a highly competitive marketplace. They require next-generation service assurance (NGSA) solutions far more inclusive, interactive and responsive in a way that easily reveals end-user impacts.

Want to help your customers achieve an all-encompassing NGSA so they maximize customer satisfaction and long-term profitability? You need to offer solutions that provide a complete view of their network, enabling them to make real-time decisions.

Across industries, Neo4j is used to ensure high-performance network and IT operations by companies such as Telenor, Cisco, CenturyLink and HP. Also, three of the top five global telecom equipment companies rely on Neo4j.

We have proven expertise enabling network software and services providers to quickly integrate and embed Neo4j so you can get to market faster with unique solutions and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Service Assurance Practices

• Fault and event management
• Performance management
• Single points of failure (SPOF) detection
• Network and service testing
• Traffic engineering and diversity routing
• Configuration management
• Customer experience management
• Trouble ticket management

Next-Generation Service Assurance Solutions

For decades, service assurance practices have used fragmented views of the network and services that are typically manually curated and often inaccurate. Sticking to this status quo today results in costly and unsatisfactory service quality.

Successful companies are embracing next-generation service assurance that leverages a comprehensive, real-time view of services and infrastructure with an eye on end-user experiences, new service creation and predictive modeling.

Communication service providers and enterprise IT operations are leveraging NGSA solutions with innovations in three areas: visibility, scalability and adaptability. However, delivering such advanced solutions is nontrivial with traditional methods that are often too rigid and hierarchical to keep up with today’s highly complex and dynamic networks.

As a result, many leading telecoms and IT teams are considering more network-native approaches that accurately reflect their highly interconnected services and handle related but disparate data sources. These organizations know that NGSA solutions require a dynamic, performant foundation that richly illustrates relationships.

Conclusion

In a time of exploding network complexity, the scale and performance demanded by next-generation service assurance requires real-time use of the relationships across all data elements in the network infrastructure.

The network itself is a graph, and its manifold, ever shifting connections cannot be modeled effectively in a traditional RDBMS platform.

In the coming weeks, we’ll dive into the advantages of a native graph database approach for quickly building unique service assurance solutions with Neo4j. We’ll take a closer look at ways leading CSPs use graph technology to capitalize on new market opportunities by creating products and services that uncover hidden patterns and insights.