Rakuten Symphony offers a new yet proven approach to automated, end-to-end service assurance. It gives operators a way to reduce today’s operations costs, but also a future-proof solution able to support the journey from today’s 2G/3G/4G mobile and fixed networks through to cloud-native networks of 5G and beyond—placing all involved on the path to network autonomy.
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Due to the complexity involved and skills required, Service Assurance is an expensive function today.
The typical approach to Service Assurance is a collection of systems integrated together, and to multiple vendor EMSs and individual elements, to poll for performance or status data (typically on a 15-minute interval) and visualize network/service status.
Conventional solutions are increasingly limited in their ability to deal with the situations faced by operators introducing 4G, 5G and cloud-based networks. The effect of these limitations will be higher costs, more failures, and longer times to diagnose and resolve faults.
To reduce the cost of today’s operations and effectively manage the current and future network, operators require a new kind of solution for Service Assurance. One that provides:
Automation of assurance processes, enabling future closed-loop network remediation and optimization. This will reduce the effort spent by humans in identifying, diagnosing, isolating, and resolving problems.
More use of real-time (streamed) data – telemetry – not limited to periodic polling. A new solution will combine streaming and non-streaming data sources. This will deliver the greater responsiveness demanded, reducing financial penalties.
A complete view of the real-time network and services, including dynamic components and cloud infrastructure. This will reduce or eliminate costs associated with manual piecing together of complex information.
Focused use of AI/ML to identify trends and patterns that are impossible for humans to detect and allows the gradual introduction of AI-based optimized assurance. This will reduce the costs of people to analyze data.
Replication and optimization of current operational capability (fault, performance, and configuration management), but enhanced with a real time view. This will reduce cost by gradual rationalization/consolidation of systems.
Scalability is based on a modern cloud-native architecture and a platform that can consolidate legacy EMSs over time, rationalize the Service Assurance environment, and provide a common foundation for Intelligent Operations more widely. This will reduce operations costs by enabling gradual rationalization/consolidation of systems and removal of duplicated functions and capabilities (such as databases and analytics).
Improved business processes and organization structure.
Near real-time insights into health and performance of the entire network, collecting raw data from network devices or EMS.
Automated mechanism to monitor and manage network wide faults, simplifying network alert management .
Automation of maintenance, expansion, and upgradation of the network minimizing configuration errors and downtime.
Monitoring system used for collecting, transforming, and publishing data for performance, logs, events, and fault collection.
The Symphony approach to Service Assurance is built on four foundational elements required for significantly lower cost, more effective, and future-proof end-to-end service assurance:
Visualization and analysis of real-time telemetry from a more complex, software-defined infrastructure.
The ability to rapidly create and operationalize automatic analysis and completion of tasks. The use of AI is an integral part of automation.
A cloud-native design that scales gracefully as data volume and variety inevitably increases.
A common foundation that will support the transition from today’s networks and operations to the more autonomous networks of the future.
The Symphony approach addresses the underlying causes of labor-intensive, high-cost service assurance. In Service Assurance as it is practiced today, costs are kept high by labor on tasks that could be automated - or eliminated altogether.
Symops Service Assurance for automated, end-to-end service assurance provides a rich set of standard capabilities that operators expect for fault management, performance monitoring, and configuration management, running on the common underlying Symworld platform.
Two value-add products support these core functions:
Symops Observability Framework is a carrier-grade platform that enables end-to-end visibility into the fault, log, performance, and traces for Applications, Network Functions, Network Elements, Clusters, and Bare-Metal Systems.
The Symworld Platform is explicitly designed for the telecom industry delivering cloud-native microservices across many different applications, such as databases, analytics, workflow, and automation.
