We live in a connected world. Whether we’re in line at the grocery store checkout, running laps at the gym, waiting for our train, or closing a business deal – the need to be connected is constant.
Never have carriers – and their IT systems – faced processing so much data. Operators face an uphill battle to put infrastructure in place that can deal not only with the stresses and strains of big data, but one that can support 5G networks and the Internet of Things, says Tom Griffin, MD EMEA at SevOne.
Stories of network failures, outages and glitches seem to plague customers regularly, leaving users unable to access content and services. Carriers are expected to deliver a quality experience, regardless of surges in demand.
But behind the headlines – Mayweather-Pacquiao pay-per-view TV refunds offered due to glitches, Surge of Star Wars fans too much for ticket sites, and Hey, NFL, no one much likes the Yahoo broadcast of Bills-Jaguars – lies one common truth.
Despite investing millions in infrastructure, operators often depend on legacy IT systems that were simply not built with the modern mobile experience in mind. These infrastructures are more likely to collapse under the sheer weight of online activity.
The biggest threat in successfully delivering an application or service is the ability to scale that application or service to meet consumer demands. A key component of the solution is a digital infrastructure management platform that reports on current and future capacity needs. Service providers rely on platforms like SevOne to monitor and report on the impact that major world events have on their network capacity.
One SevOne customer recently completed a sizeable migration project. The carrier moved off its legacy infrastructure – which included first generation VoIP equipment and 100 soft switches – to a modern IMS infrastructure. The carrier also reduced the number of physical sites from 100 to six, and added redundancies so customers are less likely to notice impacting events.
Since the carrier had functioned off a legacy infrastructure for years, the organisation didn’t have a solid understanding of what is normal on the new, modern infrastructure.
For carriers, it’s essential to understand – on any infrastructure – volume, SIP codes, the number of connections coming through switches, how many calls are succeeding, how many are not and much more.
To gain insight into what’s normal and what’s not on the new infrastructure, the carrier utilised SevOne’s baseline feature, to report and alert on network changes and potential service-impacting events. Carriers don’t have 15 minutes to wait and see if something is impacting their network. They need to know right away.
Baselining also helped the carrier to understand that just because the primary infrastructure fails, customers are not automatically impacted when a redundancy system is in place. Customers may not be experiencing problems if the secondary system kicked in, and baselining allows this carrier to know what level to escalate an alert to and whether it is truly a widespread outage situation, or just a minor blip.
When this carrier now sees a deviation, they understand that they might have a problem. They don’t wait for a break, they watch for leading indicators that can point them to unexpected changes or network degredation.
Digital infrastructure monitoring provides carriers with the assurance to deliver quality service to customers, whether they’re serving 1 million customers in Boston or 100 million customers across the globe. Monitoring solutions ensure networks remain up and running.
The author of the blog is Tom Griffin, MD EMEA at SevOne.
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