The Importance of Networks In the Customer Experience: Effective Service Assurance to Maintain Availability and Minimize Revenue Loss

In today’s complex network environments, effective Service Assurance is essential to maintain availability and minimize revenue loss due to Service Level Agreement violations. The time taken to identify and resolve service-impacting network problems are key indicators of the efficiency of the Service Assurance process.

Accurate and efficient network event correlation offers the potential to accelerate the whole Service Assurance process, since:

- The time taken initially to identify network problems and their consequent service impact is significantly reduced;

- The time taken subsequently to resolve network problems is on average reduced because accurate problem analysis has the major benefit of reducing ‘bad truck rolls’.

Event correlation is available in many forms, for example reducing the volume of events presented to operators so they may see the ‘wood from the trees’. Typical event reductions of 75-80% are practically achievable using tools commonly available today. More interesting, is the potential to combine knowledge of the physical, logical and service structures in a network to identify network problems and service impacts using automated root cause analysis, so-called topology correlation.

The results of the application of topology correlation at MTN, one of the largest Mobile network infrastructures in the African continent, demonstrates the inherent flexibility of the approach as it utilizes pre-packaged and tested correlation knowledge and operates over interdependent network sub-domains.

Of particular interest to MTN is the combination of business data with the correlation process to drive unique service oriented dashboard displays that provides rapid indications of network problems and consequent customer impacts in a user-friendly way. When used by executives, product managers and customer service managers it also reports the potential cost of delays in problem resolution thereby facilitating a revenue-driven approach to resolving ongoing network issues.

Meet NetBoss Technologies at their exhibition stand P15, at Africacom 12-14 November 2013:  CTICC Cape Town, South Africa and find out more about customer focused service assurance.