Provider Connectivity Assurance Solution

Overview

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Components and Architecture

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance's (formally Accedian Skylight) tools for monitoring next generation networks are just part of this overarching solution portfolio, as it encompasses physical and virtual monitoring components, co-existing to provide best-of-breed visibility into physical and virtual infrastructure quality.

How Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Works

• Generate performance data in the most granular, precise and efficient way.
• Collect and store data in a scalable manner.
• Analyze data and produce insights that can have meaningful impact on our customers' business and their end customers' QoE.
• Manage data in a way that can be fully automated and orchestrated.

The Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance software platform components and VNFs consist of:

Legacy orchestrator (formerly Skylight orchestrator)
Centralized management for network Assurance Sensors, and SFP and module devices.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Agents (formerly Skylight 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.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor Control (formerly Skylight 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.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance on premises and cloud
Passive network and application (DNS, TCP, HTTP, ...) performance management for multilayer environments.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Skylight performance analytics)
Cloud-native service analytics platform for quality of experience (QoE) reporting, on-demand service assurance, and real-time closed-loop automation, including:

• Cisco and 3rd party network & application telemetry that can generate billions of data points daily
• Big data service to analyze data at telemetry scale
• Leverage machine learning and AI to correlate events, detect anomalies, and gain insight into network and application performance

For physical network access, the solution offers:

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensor SFP and Sensor Module (formerly Skylight sensor: SFP compute & modules)

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

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Sensors (formerly Skylight performance elements)
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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