Expanding legacy passive monitoring systems as traffic increases can be costly. Active Monitoring can run alongside, and augment, passive systems, and in time reduce the investment required to expand them.

The complexity of today’s dynamic, virtualised, software-defined networks means that Active Monitoring is a necessity to maintain KPIs and SLAs. However, there is still a place for Passive Monitoring, but it brings challenges and expense.

With the virtualised, dynamic nature of today’s networks, and the advanced services they carry, Active Monitoring is essential in order to ensure that KPIs and SLAs are met on an on-going basis. Take a smart factory as an example, the service must be delivered to a very high standard – any drop in service levels will not be tolerated by the customer.

Room for Passive Monitoring?

It’s the same with any network slice or service. In such an increasingly multi-vendor, competitive landscape, customers will simply jump ship if the requisite SLAs are not met. That’s where Active Monitoring can help. This involves the injection of realistic traffic using software agents in the network, and the measurement of the session behaviour, quality and experiences delivered.

Because the sessions are tailored, highly specific flows can be emulated in the live network – providing a rich source of data that captures experiences and service performance. This data contributes to the on-going monitoring of the network and services so that any issues can be remediated before they impact the QoS and QoE of the customer.

Before networks became virtualised and the advent of software-defined networking, the network architecture was very static. At the same time, services were often closely correlated with the bare metal on which they ran, so passive monitoring was adequate.

Passive monitoring provides in-depth data about specific parts of the network or a service. Many operators have deployed extensive investments in passive probes, tapping into every interface, across every domain. As traffic and data volumes grow, this requires significant additional investment in incremental capacity, creating a drain on resources.

However, this data is analysed retrospectively. That’s why Active Monitoring is a necessity in today’s dynamic network environment, where services and network slices are provisioned and retired constantly and their KPI requirements, or those of the customer, may also change quickly. Any potential drop in service levels must be immediately identified and remedial action taken.

Active Monitoring provides real-time simulation of live services, as experienced by the soft agents – so this data matches the experiences of active devices and users. With a solution like Evolver, this can be achieved at a micro level – or with millions of user agents, providing a realistic flow of data that provides a real-time picture of how services are actually performing.

Passive monitoring data can show how service flows function, but they do not relate directly to the end-user experience in the network – and, scaling can become costly.

Active Monitoring can augment passive legacy systems

That’s not to say that there is no room for passive monitoring. There is. It offers very in-depth data about a whole raft of network parameters to show how it worked under specific conditions.

However, it must run alongside active monitoring. Passive monitoring brings a number of challenges, while not covering the capabilities required today. First, as mentioned it’s retrospective so it cannot be relied upon to ensure on-going optimum service levels in today’s dynamic networks.

At the same time, many CSPs still have legacy passive monitoring systems. These need to be upgraded as capacity or demand increases. This can be a costly and time-consuming process. It can be a large drain on resources, in fact, as capacity needs to be added as demand or traffic increases.

With Emblasoft Evolver’s Active Monitoring capabilities running alongside your passive legacy systems, operators and carriers can reduce the investment that’s required to add capacity to the existing platform. Active monitoring data supplements passive probe data – and enriches it, because it reflects user devices experiences.

Emblasoft Evolver Active Monitoring can reduce investment in passive legacy systems

Emblasoft Evolver means that CSPs can retain their existing investment, which in some cases can be significant, while upgrading interfaces and use cases to active monitoring as required. It also means that you can use measurements from active monitoring to augment those from the passive system, which again reduces the investment required to upgrade and expand legacy systems.

As well as providing functional testing in the lab before launch, Emblasoft Evolver offers advanced active monitoring functionality. It uses active agents within the network that interact with services to provide real-time verification of services levels. If service performance drops to a set level administrators or engineers will be alerted so that they can rectify any issues before they impact the customer.

It provides a pro-active approach to network management and optimisation. The cost levels for Evolver are significantly below those of passive systems. It can run alongside your legacy monitoring systems, augmenting them, while offering a different path – which you can traverse in your own time – to testing and monitoring.

It is elastically scalable and, in turn, can help to reduce the investment required to expand passive systems. It also supports DevOps practices to enable innovation, agility, and the continuous deployment and upgrade of differentiated services and for new use cases to be added, automatically, as required.

To find out more, contact us today.