QUICK LOOK
Business Ethernet Services: Assuring the Enterprise Service Offerings
For cable operators, business customers represent
a significant growth opportunity. They generate more
revenue per account and they deploy more services and
more sophisticated services then a residential user making
them more valuable subscribers.
The business services they are looking to for Ethernet
based services like Dedicated Ethernet, Ethernet Networks
Services, and Ethernet Private Line and Ethernet Virtual
Private Line Service to support their operations. These
Ethernet services fall in line with the technological
evolution cable operators are pursuing.
The challenge with serving business customers is that
they often require Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that
place performance requirements on the operator. There
are two ways to assure that a network meets these SLAs:
1. Over engineer the network, or 2. Deploy intelligence in
the network to let you know when issues begin to arise but
before they become SLA impacting.
The nGenius® Service Assurance Solution provides
operators the end-to-end visibility to assure the delivery
of Business Ethernet Services and internet protocol (IP)
applications. This allows cable operators to confidently
deliver business services with the knowledge that all
Service Level Agreements are met.
Solution: A Robust Service Assurance
Infrastructure
To assure the delivery of Business Ethernet Services to
enterprise customers, an operator needs a global view of
the network from the core to the cable modem or Ethernet
access/termination point.
The nGenius Service Assurance Solution allows a cable
operator to monitor the data and control plane operations
and performance at the network, service enabler, and
application level. These service delivery levels are
complex, dynamic, and act in unison (Figure 1).
Business Ethernet Service Assurance
Ingest
Satellite
Core
Edge
Access
CMTS
Encoders
Off Air
Consumption
HFC
Cable/
Broadband
Modem
VOD Servers
National HE
Internet
Head End/Media Data Center
Office
Edge QAM
Portal Servers
IMF
SIP Peering
SBC
Service
Enablers
PSTN
Soft Switch
Authentication
Servers
Internet, TV,
VOD Cache
Regional Media Data Center
End-to-End View of Network, Service Enablers, Applications
Figure 1: End-to-end view of Business Services.
SERVICE PROVIDER - CABLE/MSO
Cable
Modem
Office
Network
At the network level, the nGenius solution provides
visibility into network problems such as link congestions,
capacity issues, load balancing errors, bandwidth spikes,
network configuration problems, firewall issues or broadly
IP transport problems.
Service Enabler
At the service enabler layer, the nGenius solution can
detect problems such as authentication and authorization
issues, report on billing/mediation platforms and monitor
protocols including Radius, Lightweight Directory Access
Protocol (LDAP), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
(DHCP) and Domain Name Service (DNS) protocols at the
Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) and
DNS servers.
Application
At the application layer, nGenius solution provides
application and usage visibility by monitoring SMTP
(Email),TCP for packet retransmission and loss, SIP and
SIP Trunking for Unified Communications, Real-Time
Messaging Protocol (RTMP), and HyperText Transfer
Protocol (HTTP) Live Streaming Protocol for streaming
video to TV, tablet and smartphone devices. Our
solution proactively alerts on errors or violations against
established baselines such as response time delays,
frozen video, or audio only video. This enables quick
resolution of issues via a seamless integrated workflow to
locate the root cause of the problem.
QUICK LOOK | Business Ethernet Services: Assuring the Enterprise Service Offerings
Service Assurance for Business Services
Leveraging the nGenius Service Assurance Solution, it is
easier to detect which network elements are generating
the delays, errors, congestions, and transactions. It
allows you to view detailed response time analysis
on the origination and termination servers and detect
anomalous application and server behavior at the portal,
origin, segmentation, vault and CDN. This allows your
team to monitor the delivery of premium services across
applications and the network with a proactive approach to
prevent service-impacting performance issues.
The nGenius solution provides your operations team
a unified contextual dashboard view into all the critical
service delivery elements required for delivery of business
content services between customer locations to assure the
highest quality user experience and compliance with SLAs.
Cable operators can now scale and manage the dynamic
nature and complexity of Business IP service delivery with
rich protocol analysis.
With NetScout, operators can confidently provide SLAs to
their business customers while ensuring the efficient usage
and deployment of technology in the network.
characteristics of the network, service enablers, and
applications, nGenius Service Delivery Manager is
able to provide anomaly detection for proactive service
management. nGenius Service Delivery Manager allows
you to “see” control plane and data plane issues before
they become customer effecting.
With the nGenius Service Assurance solution, your
service assurance strategy can easily be extend to
monitor your other cloud-based services like carrier WiFi
services and TV Everywhere services, allowing MSOs the
ability to maximize the technology investments they have
made and track the success of new services.
nGenius Performance Manager provides service usage
insight and analytics. Our Performance Manager allows
you real-time information on network, service enabler, and
application performance.
The NetScout Advantage
The nGenius Infinistream® appliance provides Sniffer®
Intelligence for troubleshooting and forensic analysis. With
the nGenius Infinistream appliance, you have packet-level
information for root cause analysis.
The nGenius solution seamlessly goes beyond business
service performance monitoring and provides business
and operational analytics and reporting that fosters
collaboration between operations, engineering, marketing,
and sales providing all your organizations insight to all your
service and network initiatives.
More than 148 Service Providers in 46 countries rely on
the nGenius Service Assurance Solution to gain greater
control of their network and services.
The nGenius Solution provides insight and analysis
that has allowed operators to make better use of the
technology they have deployed. Our solutions have
reduced the mean-time-to-respond and mean-time-torepair when issues occur. Our network insight has help
foster better collaboration across functional areas with
better reporting and tracking tools, and we have helped
organizations reduced the time to deliver new services.
FLOW
KPI
PACKET
Single Solution with an End-to-End View
The nGenius Service Assurance Solution (Figure 2)
consist of a suite of monitoring services that provides
end-to-end real-time, service early warning detection, and
pre-emptive and predictive performance monitoring that
can be used in a network operations center (NOC), and
provides the detail required for engineering to address
network issues. The nGenius Service Assurance Solution
provides a proactive end-to-end view of your network,
service enablers, and applications.
nGenius Service Delivery Manager provides actionable
customer experience insight and executive, high-level
reporting that supports cross functional coordination
and analysis of services. By developing behavioral
Service Oriented Top-Down Approach
Figure 2: nGenius Service Assurance Architecture.
Americas East
310 Littleton Road
Westford, MA 01886-4105
Phone: 978-614-4000
Toll Free: 800-357-7666
Americas West
178 E. Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
Phone: 408-571-5000
Asia Pacific
17F/B
No. 167 Tun Hwa N. Road
Taipei 105, Taiwan
Phone: +886 2 2717 1999
Europe
One Canada Square
29th floor, Canary Wharf
London E14 5DY, United Kingdom
Phone: +44 207 712 1672
NetScout offers sales, support, and services in over 32 countries.
For more information, please visit
www.netscout.com or contact NetScout
at 800-309-4804 or +1 978-614-4000
Copyright © 2013 NetScout Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. NetScout, nGenius, InfiniStream and Sniffer are registered trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates
in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and product names, and registered and unregistered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.
NetScout reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to make changes at any time in its technical information, specifications, and service and support programs.
SPQL_012-13 03/2013