Telco Network Monitoring

How a European Telco Transformed Its Network Monitoring with Vision X 

Traffic volumes and user expectations continue to soar, leaving telecom providers with mounting pressure to raise service quality and lower operations costs. With service margins tightening and competition heating up, mobile operators cannot rely on outdated investment strategies that don’t keep pace with the times.

One leading century-old European provider met the challenge head-on by doubling down on network visibility. Instead of investing preemptively to add monitoring probes as its network grows, the carrier uses Keysight Vision X network packet brokers (NPBs) to optimize the value of current and future monitoring tools into the future.

“Keysight’s packet brokers have played a pivotal role in optimizing our network visibility and ensuring the smooth flow of data across our systems. Regardless of the scale or complexity of our network environment, their solutions have consistently delivered high performance and reliability allowing us to effectively manage and secure our data traffic without compromise.” — Configuration Manager

The Challenge: Scale Without Compromise

As mobile networks grow in size and traffic volumes, network operators routinely add probes so they can stay tapped into what’s happening in their environment that might impact security or subscriber experience. Simply buying and managing more probes drives up capital and operational costs, so the company’s operations support system (OSS) team developed a smarter strategy.

The team knew from experience that using a Keysight visibility platform to deliver traffic to monitoring tools improved performance and extended the useful life and investment value of its existing tools. By upgrading and adding Keysight’s modern Vision X network packet brokers at multiple operations centers the team hoped to:

• Improve monitoring probe utilization and efficiency
• Reduce tool oversubscription
• Avoid premature capital investments

Before moving forward with its monitoring upgrade, the provider asked Keysight to conduct a detailed business analysis. Keysight worked with a group of network engineers, OSS professionals, and senior IT leaders to perform a thorough due diligence and confirm that the new Vision X packet brokers would meet its goals for the project and more.

The complex business case covered both technical and financial components to make the path forward clear. The exercise showed migrating to advanced Vision X packet brokers would work better and cost less than investing heavily to buy new probes. Advanced visibility would also allow the provider to optimize the use and extend the value of probes already in place.

Because they were already familiar with Keysight’s track record for reliability and responsive support — and interoperability with preferred monitoring tools like its existing probes — the telco confidently doubled down on Keysight without trialing other solutions.

The Solution: Smarter Visibility with Vision X

The leading mobile services provider purchased and deployed nearly 20 Vision Xappliances at more than a dozen operations centers. Keysight worked closely with the internal team and a local integration partner to accelerate the initial rollout and move to a second phase.

With Vision X, the provider gained dynamic real-time visibility to help identify service-impacting issues and potential threats. Vision X also adds insightful metadata to improve analysis, and balances the traffic load across multiple monitoring probes to further lighten the load.

Utilization and ROI improved as packet brokers intelligently filter and forward only relevant traffic so that each probe — and other performance monitoring and security tools — receives exactly the traffic it needs to see at all times. Removing duplicate packets and stripping away unwanted information avoids overloading individual tools with data.

The Keysight visibility architecture can even offload decryption from individual tools to free up more resources within the network and security stacks.

What’s Next: Visibility as a Scalable Strategic Assets.

The benefits of dynamic real-time visibility go beyond saving money. Access to rich metadata generated by Vision X gives the service provider’s individual business units more actionable analytics for strengthening security and enhancing the quality of its subscriber experience.

These insights drive better network and bottom-line outcomes:

• Scalable visibility to maintain quality as subscriber traffic grows in volume and complexity
• Improved TCO that avoids premature investment in additional monitoring capacity
• The ability to prioritize the monitoring of premium services
• Access to metadata that promotes stronger security, optimal service delivery and the monetization of data for new services

Looking to the future, the telco is evaluating Keysight’s CloudLens solution to support its expanding 5G and cloud infrastructure. Having visibility serve as the optimization engine for monitoring provides a core business enabler for the mobile operator that, according to one configuration manager, “consistently delivers high-performance and reliability allowing us to manage and secure our data traffic without compromise.”

Related

Resources