Provider Connectivity Assurance Solution

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is a carrier-grade AI Ops solution designed for monitoring critical networks. It consists of a central platform and specialized monitoring sensors that collect network fault and performance data. The solution includes a suite of software and hardware Assurance Sensors that allow for ubiquitous coverage in any type of network, and at any layer of the network through active (or synthetic) testing or passive monitoring. This ultra granular sensor data can be combined with telemetry from other network sources provides deep insight and correlation capabilities for best-in-breed network assurance.

For a proper introduction to Provider Connectivity Assurance, we highly recommend watching the following videos:

• Introduction to Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
• Demo of Provider Connectivity Assurance

Also check out our product page on Cisco.com.

How Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Works

Step 1 - Instrument

Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors can deployed strategically across the critical network to either generate synthetic or passive performance data.

Synthetic testing

• Active (or synthetic) testing is the process of injecting packets into the network that emulate real traffic and allow for the proactive detection of issues before it end users
• Assurance sensors are available in hardware and software form factors, and capable of testing across layers 2 through 7
• They generate incredibly granular, precise performance data that enables the detection of even the most fleeting issues like micro-bursts

Passive monitoring

• Through real time packet analysis, performance insights on network transactions can be recorded
• This provides operations teams with the ability to investigate actual user issues to help identify if poor experiences are due to client, server or the network itself.

Step 2 - Collect

Beyond Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor data, the solution can be extended to collect telemetry and fault information from the network.

Telemetry

• Any time series data source can have its data ingested into Provider Connectivity Assurance using the provided telegraf based Telemetry Collector
• This enables extensible collection over a variety of protocols and formats

Faults

• Events can be collected from network devices for correlation in Provider Connectivity Assurance with network performance monitoring data over SNMP

Step 3 -Analyze

Once collected, the Provider Connectivity Assurance analytics tool set allows users to build custom meaningful dashboards to oversee network operations from a high level, and drill down using specialized workflows to investigate issues. Automated insights can also be sent northbound as alerts or metric feeds for cross domain correlation.

Solution Components

The Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance solution consists some centralized services, and distributed collectors and sensors.

Provider Connectivity Assurance Platform

The Provider Connectivity Assurance platform is a framework for for running centralized services, either fully hosted in the cloud, deployed on customer premise or in a hybrid model. It runs three main services:

Sensor Management

• Extensive element management capabilities for Assurance Sensors (including SFP and module devices) and Collectors
• REST, RESTConf and graphical interfaces for test session management

Streamer

• Centralized collection, normalization, enrichment and export of performance data via gNMI and Kafka

Analytics

• Modern, big data analytics tool set specialized in uncovering insights in network performance data at scale
• Enables network operations to monitor actual quality of experience (QoE) through custom dashboards, or through northbound alerts to other monitoring tools
• Customer service health portal can be supported using data permissions
• Use in real-time closed-loop automation with Crosswork automation tools
• Supports Cisco router and 3rd party network & application telemetry that can generate billions of data points daily
• Leverage machine learning and AI to correlate events, detect anomalies, and gain insight into network and application performance

Provider Connectivity Assurance Collectors

Bringing data into Provider Connectivity Assurance is the job for our data collectors.

Telemetry Collector

• When you need to pull or stream data into Provider Connectivity Assurance from a Cisco or 3rd party source, the Telemetry Collector can help! It comes out of the box with support for many IOS-XR and IOS-XE sensor paths but is extensible well beyond that!

Sensor Collector

• Sensor Collector collects data from the Telemetry Collector and Provider Connectivity Assurance Assurance Sensors.
• They are deployed close to where the data is generated and facilitate encrypted transfer to the Provider Connectivity Assurance platform for processing.

Provider Connectivity Assurance Software Sensors

Sensor Agents

• Container based microservices testing framework with open APIs for closed loop automation and instant result data streams. Sensor Agents utilize active (synthetic) test traffic.

Sensor Control

• A virtualized software test platform that can combine with hardware modules and SFPs to collect performance data from Layer 2 to Layer 4 across multi-vendor networks utilizing active (synthetic) test traffic.

Provider Connectivity Assurance Hardware Sensors

Sensor SFP and Sensor Module

• Wirespeed metering, policing, capture and active testing in compact 1G/10G form factors.

LX, LT-S, GT, GT-S

• Wirespeed ultra-high granularity 10Gbps or 1Gbps flow metering in small footprint, efficient network elements.

What Makes Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Different

Visibility

• Across all areas of the network, such as mobile networks, core networks, enterprise, datacenter, cloud, and containers
• Across all layers of the network, such as L2 (Ethernet) through L7 (application)
• Unsurpassed performance visibility, data granularity and ability to detect performance issues will allow users to see what other solutions can miss
• Fully virtualized/software based solution
• Cisco hardware is available if the user does not have a compute platform

Scale & performance

• Provider Connectivity Assurance deployed in some of the largest networks in the world
• Millions of sensors generating billions of performance measurements every day

Big Data & Machine Learning

• Leverage the power of Provider Connectivity Assurance to gain insight into network and application performance, turning billions of measurements into usable insight

Open APIs

• Provider Connectivity Assurance is a first class citizen in an automated network, with open APIs and event busses for integration into orchestration and IT systems
• Enable closed loop automation with real-time performance insight

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance components can instrument virtually any network infrastructure, and can be deployed as pure software, pure hardware, or in a software-hardware hybrid fashion.

Why choose Provider Connectivity Assurance

Our software uses the latest technologies available to achieve unprecedented accuracy for software-based measurements, leveraging microsecond-accurate timestamps from NFVi network ports, and streaming protocols to deliver the monitoring metrics in near real-time.

Provider Connectivity Assurance easily handles very large amounts of KPI data; our most dense deployment delivers more than 20 billion KPIs per day running on all-COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) servers.

Provider Connectivity Assurance APIs allow orchestration of all configurations in the monitoring topology, as well as intelligent auto-provisioning of Cisco Assurance Sensor SFP and Assurance Sensor Modules to ensure fully automated operations. When used with an orchestrator, Cisco VNFs can quickly and easily be deployed on popular OpenStack managed infrastructure running either KVM or VMware ESXi.

The lightweight Cisco reflector agent is ideal for direct deployment on hypervisor operating systems or inside VNFs as a micro service.

All for a fraction of the cost of legacy network & application performance monitoring vendors.

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