Such a holistic platform should be able to support many applications and provide the visibility to manage service across the multiple silos of servers and network applications that are tied together. This allows for measuring network traffic from an application perspective as well as from the standpoint of infrastructure capabilities. A holistic platform gives operators a comprehensive view of devices and real-time traffic flow across the entire network to assure the end-user’s QoE.
An extension of this true traffic awareness is the ability for a service provider to communicate this visibility with its own customers. Enterprises today are asking for more and more real-time visibility. It’s important for service providers to be able to offer customers this visibility in an understandable user interface that meets their customers’ needs. The trend here is not for the enterprise to ask about bandwidth. Instead, they are asking about the application of the network, the efficiency and the reliability. They are asking about the quality of the application response time more than the latency in the core, which used to be the metric in the past. Now, the enterprise wants to have end-to-end application usage reporting.
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The enterprise wants to have end-to-end application usage reporting. |
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for true traffic awareness will only increase and become even more critical. Considering the myriad of mobile services entering the marketplace and the variety of devices available, the growth in applications is almost staggering, particularly in terms of complex traffic, such as uploading and downloading video content to and from YouTube from an iPhone.
While there is an exponential explosion of the traffic, it doesn’t necessarily represent revenue for the service provider because much of the revenue goes somewhere else. Service providers have to take action to increase their revenue by adding value-added services or face the diminishing returns of simply providing the pipeline. What many providers are doing is trying to outsource what does not now seem critical for them by asking their vendor partners to deal with some of these management problems. But what will be required is the ability to adapt to the new complexity and to understand that change is necessary to grab more of the revenue.
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Another critical aspect of obtaining true traffic awareness is that it leads to the ability for proactive performance management, rather than the traditional fault management. In traditional reactive fault management, a threshold is established for unacceptable performance. But a problem develops when trying to determine how to set the threshold value. If it’s too high, end users will already be complaining before the system hits the threshold. If the value is set too low, false positive alarms can overwhelm network operators who, in the end, might ignore the alarms or turn them off. On the other hand, if you know a network’s normal traffic patterns, if there is an acceptable baseline established, when traffic deviates from the norm, you can be more proactive in digging into the details as to what is causing the change of behavior and to take appropriate steps to improve the situation before a service outage occurs.
Traffic Growth Amplifies Need for Network Visibility
While many service providers are dealing with these challenges now, in five years the need
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Ultimately, both businesses and consumers today are asking service providers to carry a wide range of different types of services, such as mobile data, residential broadband, and business services, each with its own set of quality requirements. In addition, more and more innovative applications are being introduced, and managing these applications and the resultant network traffic is becoming more and more complex. To address these challenges, service providers need true traffic awareness within a holistic platform for visibility into the relationship between services and network resources.
Such visibility provides a creative yet practical approach for identifying potential performance problems and proactively correcting them before they negatively impact end-user quality experience. Customers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and demanding of their service providers, and they will gravitate to those providers that can meet their growing expectations.
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