Live topology: empowering the SOC
For advanced service optimization in today’s competitive environment, communications service providers must strive to achieve superior performance across each service. As a result, it is essential that operational teams oversee and manage the network delivering those services from end-to-end, not just in domain specific isolation. Service operations centres (SOCs) must meet a number of challenges to ensure success: keeping on top of service performance threshold alerts, finding failure points on the network affecting subscribers and identifying service degradations. In addition, SOC teams require resources that make pre-empting faults and issues almost intuitive—stopping them before they have a negative effect on the bottom line.
Of course, introducing SDN and NFV into the mix will make these challenges even more acute, putting even greater pressure on SOC engineers to plan effectively and provide reasonable and insightful recommendations based on potential impacts.
This is where a live topology can provide a new standard of efficient service operations by giving an up-to-the-minute picture of how the network and its underlying services are configured, as well as a complete and consistent view of the customer through a single, intuitive search-based interface. Significantly, it transparently combines multiple sources of data together for the SOC simply and quickly, providing an integrated view of the network and services. As a result, network operations staff can find and resolve issues much more rapidly and customer service representatives are better informed and gain credibility with their customers, leading to faster provisioning, rapid dispute resolution, happier customers and increased upsell revenue.
The essential take away from this is that the SOC can only function effectively as long as it has accurate and up-to-date knowledge of the changing dependencies and states between customers, their services and the entire end-to-end network upon which these services depend. To achieve this, data from across business support systems (BSS), operations support systems (OSS) and network systems must be combined to construct a complete model of independent resources and dependencies which is always up to date.
For more details on why live topology is important for providing superior end-to-end performance in today’s evolving network environment, read Appledore Research Group’s paper entitled The Importance of Live Topology in the Modern Service Operation Center.
