Astellia has announced an intelligent traffic load balancer for flexible user plane monitoring and troubleshooting solution, called Flex.The product has been developed in response to communications service providers’ (CSPs) needs for more flexible, scalable and future-proof monitoring solutions. Astellia says Flex is an important milestone within its next generation monitoring offerings that address the industry’s migration towards NFV/SDN. Flex is available as software, running on commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, which the company claims reduces the required hardware footprint by 40%. Flex intelligently load balances traffic across different soft probes to ensure monitoring stability.
In order to reduce user plane monitoring costs and improve scalability, Flex can target user plane traffic based on criteria such as IMSI, mobile app, APName, QCI, geographical areas, handset and IP address while still generating QoS information – throughput & volume – for every subscriber.
“User plane analysis is valuable and important for CSPs to understand network usage and customer experience,” said Cedric Arnaud-Battandier, the chief marketing officer at Astellia. “Flex allows them to control their user plane monitoring budget by selecting full or on-demand deep packet inspection analysis and invest as they grow.” e
