Mobility Performance Monitoring Overview

This article provides a detailed process for configuring mobility performance monitoring in Provider Connectivity Assurance.

It is assumed that the intended audience understands network monitoring concepts and protocols such as SNMP, Streaming Telemetry, REST APIs, Performance Management, and Network KPIs.

Cisco’s product, Provider Connectivity Assurance, provides performance monitoring of mobility packet core networks. This section provides step-by-step instructions for configuring mobility packet core performance monitoring within Provider Connectivity Assurance.

Solution Architecture

Mobility performance monitoring in Provider Connectivity Assurance consists of a Mobility Collector that ingests bulkstats from 4G and 5G network devices and sends them to Provider Connectivity Assurance.

Data Resiliency

The Telemetry Collector and Sensor Collector that act as a gateway between Mobility Collector and Provider Connectivity Assurance are not supported in High Availability mode.  However there is resiliency built into the solution to ensure that data processing will resume gracefully if any components experience down time:

• Mobility Collector provides a feature for enabling Bulkstats files to be written to two SFTP servers.  If one of the SFTP servers goes down, the Mobility Collector can be configured to seamlessly switch to the backup SFTP server, ensuring no data loss. If the Mobility Collector itself becomes unavailable, it will need to be restarted, and will seamlessly continue processing the PM Bulkstats files when processing resumes.

• If connectivity between Mobility Collector and Telemetry Collector is lost, there is buffering on the message bus so that processing can resume when the Telemetry Collector resumes processing. Data is cached on the message bus for for 7 days.

• In the situation where Sensor Collector becomes unavailable, Telemetry Collector will retain 1000 batches of incoming data and replay when Sensor Collector resumes processing. This is configurable if a larger retention volume is desired.

• Sensor Collector holds onto your data if PCA becomes unavailable. Data will be cached based on your configured disk size.