Capacity Analysis & Reporting

StableNet^® Use Case – Performance & Service

Discovery &
Inventory

Network Configuration & Change

Fault Management &
Root Cause Analysis

Performance &
Service

Capacity Analysis & Reporting:

A critical toolset to simplify complex analyses and decision-making for an optimized network infrastructure

See how the new Capacity Metric Module in StableNet^® helps take the guesswork out of network capacity, availability and forecasting and provides an easily-visualized building block for smarter investments.

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Background & Motivation

Chocolate cake, pairs of shoes and fine wine: there are multiple instances in life when having too much is better than having too little. However, when it comes to your network infrastructure, your best approach is to follow the “Goldilocks Principle” and find the solution that is just right. Network operators in the telecommunications industries are particularly hard-pressed to ensure that they can manage multiple KPIs and consistently deliver excellent availability and performance to their market(s). An efficient and cost-effective approach seeks to minimize capital expenditures (CapEx) without sacrificing excellent service delivery of your business-critical applications and service-level agreements (SLAs). Your task then is to identify optimal performance thresholds and, with an up-to-date insight into current loads, make intelligent, pro-active investments. The reality is that almost nobody is going to praise excellent capacity management, but there is little doubt that they will become loud once performance begins to suffer.

Without a vendor-independent, scalable, and automated capacity management tool, you may be wasting resources without knowing it. For many new customers, an up-to-date view of their entire network link traffic and interface loads helps them to realize that they have over-capacity in some areas, while other interfaces are dangerously close to (or even exceeding) pre-determined thresholds. Thus the first step is often a reactive correcting for pre-existing inefficiencies. While this is a critical starting point, the real goal is to identify potential problems before they occur and update your infrastructure accordingly. Proactive capacity management requires one thing above all else – information.

StableNet^®Solution

StableNet^® Solution

StableNet^® offers a powerful network performance solution that provides you with key metrics about the entirety of your multi-vendor and –technology infrastructure. This includes information about round-trip time, throughput, jitter, latency, packet loss, and many, many more measurements that are absolutely critical for performance maintenance. Automated alarm and root cause analysis greatly facilitates quicker response times and improved mean time to repair (MTTR). The powerful Weather Map functionality allows you to visualize your architecture, enabling a “big picture” overview of your current network traffic. And with the new, fully scalable Capacity Metric Module, a new world of possibilities, options and insights begins to open up.

Figure 1: The Weather Map Module within StableNet^® – visualize your architecture and get an overview of your current network traffic.

In order to manage a network effectively, you need a thorough understanding of current capacity and availability metrics. Current network traffic loads and historical peaks are an excellent starting point, but detailed analysis requires a higher degree of statistical complexity. And while peak busy hour traffic is certainly important, it‘s duration is not factored in and it has a disproportional impact when looking at other key metrics such as sums and averages. The Capacity Metric Module helps with scenario planning to dimension and balance available network capacities appropriately between infrastructure CapEx and right-sized network resilience strategies, minimizing risks of traffic and revenue loss. One option with the Capacity Metric Module is to look at quantiles (95%, 98%, or your own customizable requirements) which specifically exclude the impact of undesirable outliers. And with the highly popular “trend” metric (based on a linear regression of recent performance), you can make data-driven estimations of how your traffic is developing for future insight.

Figure 2: Scale or simulate network traffic to proactively identify
bottlenecks before they occur with the Capacity Metric Module.

Do you want to know what would happen if network traffic increases by 20% over the next month? Are you forecasting 50% growth in network traffic over the next year? Another key feature that is bundled with the module is the Capacity Metric Map, which allows for radically more powerful forecasting capabilities. Simply plug in estimated values (which could also be based off of the aforementioned trend statistic) and the updated Weather Map will show you bottlenecks before they occur. Because latency and capacity are so critical, it includes a simple color-coding to indicate warning levels and the ability to differentiate between types of network data being measured (VoIP conversations, video streaming, data downloads, etc.). This simulation functionality is absolutely indispensable in data-driven capacity forecasting and planning.

Benefits & Results

An increasingly competitive marketplace, constantly fluctuating loads in network traffic, and multiple SLAs that you must deliver – telecommunications service providers are under constant pressure to analyze and optimize network performance and service delivery. With the new Capacity Metric Module, StableNet^® Telco customers now have the opportunity to radically expand upon the current performance measurement functionalities for far greater insight. A portfolio of new statistical analyses, including trend analysis and quantile filtering, make it much easier to get detailed information to specific, real-world questions. And the new Capacity Metric Map empowers you to visualize forecasts and simplify data-driven simulations so you can have time to proactively plan additions to your infrastructure before it’s too late. With the added functionalities and features to performance and capacity management in StableNet^®, we are continuing to push the envelope and innovate so that you can do the same. All of this is available in a platform that is vendor-independent, highly customizable, with multiple opportunities for the automation of redundant and time-consuming tasks.