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 third-party network and 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

For information on performance data retention, see here.

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 third-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 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

Assurance 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.

Assurance Sensors GT/GT-S, LT-S, and LX-S

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