Assurance Center
Automate assurance for network and service operations
Nokia Assurance Center is a multi-vendor, multi-technology and multi-domain assurance solution that spans traditionally separate and disparate systems and domain silos. Together with Nokia Orchestration Center, the Assurance Center module leverages Bell Labs AI and ML technology to enable round-trip operations automation as part of Nokia’s Digital Operations Center.
Assurance Center delivers a modern microservices and cloud-native based approach. It delivers tangible business benefits with real-world projects now supporting a 5G-era operations paradigm.
As 5G adoption quickens and as communication service providers (CSPs) increase their agility to support market requirements, a tighter closed-loop operating environment is required. Assurance Center supports this objective on two levels:
- As CSPs are forging B2B partnerships with vertical industrial players, service level agreements (SLA’s) are an important currency for those relationships. CSPs require assurance systems that can adopt and support SLAs that are “designed-in” to the services during the commercial negotiations with the B2B partners
- To control costs driven by an ever-growing demand for capacity, CSPs are well along their transition to leverage cloud technologies. This creates a multifold increase in network and service complexity which cannot be effectively supported at scale by legacy assurance systems.
Modules
Assurance Center is a modular solution; all modules are microservices-based and addressable through open interfaces to enable automation.
OperationsHub
OperationsHub monitors end-to-end services and triggers closed-loop/open loop actions towards orchestration. It also provides network and service analytics for advanced troubleshooting, trend analysis, forecasting via IntelligenceHub.
IntelligenceHub
IntelligenceHub capabilities include advanced root-cause analysis, automated capacity management, insights for automation, topology views and machine-learning algorithms.
Service Assurance
The Service Assurance sub-module prioritizes resolution based on service impact and assures SLA targets. It supports service impact analysis with service views, service dependency analysis and service impact prioritization. It also monitors service quality and SLAs and can trigger automated actions to resolve service affecting faults.
Reporting, root cause and service impact analysis
The Reporting and Analysis sub-module consolidates multiple data feeds to provide unified analytics to feed diverse assurance processes. This enables end-to-end performance monitoring and fast troubleshooting by combining and exploiting any data in the system.
Event management and automations
The Event management and automations sub-module enables closed loop operations, driving efficiency in operations and reduction in costs by automating tasks. It provides preventive healing, restoration and trouble ticket lifecycle management. It can also monitor, correlate and suppress alarms and detect false positives.
Domain Adaptation
The Domain Adaptation layer provides an abstracted view of the underlaying network domains towards service orchestration. This hides service design and orchestration complexity and enables end-to-end, high-level service design and operation.
Unified Inventory
Unified Inventory is a shared logical resource and service inventory also used by Orchestration Center. It closes the loop between service delivery and assurance processes. This enables assurance to immediately monitor services once they have been instantiated by orchestration.
Benefits and features
Improve key operational KPIs to drive customer satisfaction & operational efficiencies
- Consolidation of siloed operation and different data types (PM, FM, CM, vProbes and telemetry) from multiple technologies and vendors
- Automated performance and event management
Rapidly adapt to your specific needs
- Enabling automation and correlation with automated workflows to minimize manual intervention with an open system that can be integrated easily into existing processes
- Aligned with industry standards relevant for service orchestration and 5G slice management, including TM Forum, 3GPP and ETSI
Benefit from closed-loop integration with orchestration
- During service design SLAs are passed to assurance for faster time-to-market, higher automation and increased service quality to avoid penalties
- End-to-end service modeling and monitoring including service impact analysis (SIA)
Simplify software lifecycle management with cloud native architecture
- Deployable on any cloud infrastructure: microservices architecture eases software lifecycle management and maintenance efforts with embedded resiliency, scalability and zero downtime
- Reduce delivery effort and time with DevOps methodology
Assurance Center as part of Nokia’s Digital Operations Center
Nokia’s award-winning Digital Operations Center is a modular solution comprised of Orchestration Center and Assurance Center leveraging a common Unified Inventory. It’s this combination that gives you the ability to manage the entire service lifecycle by designing, delivering, and assuring digital services and 5G slicing at scale and speed.
The Digital Operations Center is a solution that can be used in a fully automated, round-trip, closed-loop mode but it also has a rich user-interface layer for manual activities. This is important to enable gradual development, testing and use of automated steps as required by each respective deployment.
It’s a fully cloud-native platform that is built to support multi-vendor, multi-domain, and multi-technology environments across any cloud deployment model. Per its role within the CSP eco-system, Digital Operations Center supports numerous standards where and as they apply to include TMF, ETSI, MEF, 3GPP, BBF, ONF and IETF.
The Digital Operations Center’s primary role within the CSP eco-system is to:
- Manage the full end-to-end service lifecycle to include the design, deployment, and assurance of services to meet contractual Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
- Abstract the complexity of the underlying network to expose its capabilities northbound to commercial/business support systems on an intent-based level
- Provide southbound interface and oversight to network layer systems so they can support the design, deployment, and end-to-end assurance of services
By closing the loop between traditionally separate orchestration and assurance processes, you can intelligently manage the full-service lifecycle to drive the most optimized use of infrastructure resources, limit overprovisioning, control fault management, enable automation and optimization.
Business benefits and case studies
Find out about the lessons learned from real-world deployments with leading service providers and enterprises around the globe, such as Telenor in Norway, SPTel in Singapore and many others. Learn how we helped CSPs to decrease problem resolution time by resolving 30% of trouble tickets with close-loop automation. Or how our assurance solution helped to improve network utilization efficiency by 200%.