In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Tom Foottit, Director of Product Management for Service Assurance at Accedian (now part of Cisco) on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Tom joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How do your solutions and products fulfill the demands of today's networks?
Tom: Today's digital experiences transcend traditional network environment boundaries, and multi-domain, multi-layer context is critical for delivering on experience expectations. Visibility in these environments is often siloed due to the number of tools and solutions needed, or due to the multi-domain, multi-cloud nature of these environments themselves. On top of the increasing complexity, the cost and resources required to manage these environments increases.
Today, network performance visibility solutions typically focus at the device level and not at the service level. This perspective cannot provide an accurate view of the impact the network is having on customer experience, and, as a result, the number one way to understand the impact on customers is through trouble tickets.
The key to maintaining quality of experience and quality of service is to be proactive and catch issues before they happen. To be proactive you must have the granularity of visibility, or the sampling interval, the right KPIs, and the ability to combine and correlate both device-centric and service-centric visibility across multi-vendor infrastructure. It also requires massive carrier-grade scale.
Why?
- Too large a sampling interval will smooth out microbursts and transient issues that can be the real culprits in recurring issues for end customers, leading to more tickets to resource and more churn. Real-time, microsecond-level granularity is required to see what is really happening in the network. These ‘micro’ views will give insight to potential ‘macro’ issues.
- Device-centric visibility typically looks at hard failures – end user experience can be poor, but looking only at device-level tools could show that things are ‘all green’! On the reverse-side, devices can show issues that might not be impacting the end user. Device-centric visibility is important, but must be correlated with service-centric visibility, providing insight into how the real service is experienced by end users.
- Service-centric visibility using synthethic or active test traffic mimics, in real-time, the experience of an end-user, using standards-based, telco-grade testing and protocols. Coupled with AI-enabled predictive analytics, network operations teams are empowered with insight into where and when problems may occur so they can address them proactively, even before end users are affected.
Designed for networks with stringent performance requirements, Accedian Skylight (now part of Cisco) enables team with proactive insight, while simplifying troubleshooting and improving management efficiency for optimized digital experiences. Unified, real-time visibility of end-to-end network and service-centric quality provides a robust foundation to automate assurance, backed by AI-enabled predictive analytics.
Ariana: How important is traffic visibility for your suite of solutions and products?
Tom: Most tools talk about how to troubleshoot network issues. With Skylight, the goal is to eliminate the need to troubleshoot and fix issues altogether. Granular, real-time traffic visibility is the bedrock of the solution, and, in our opinion, a key requirement for network operations teams managing owned or critical network infrastructure.
Accedian Skylight is a vital component of Cisco’s robust, end-to-end network assurance portfolio. It provides microsecond-level visibility and service-centric insight, enabling organizations to boost revenue from advanced network services while delivering competitive SLAs and exceptional experiences. The granular, service-centric data generated by Skylight sensors or AI-driven insights produced within Skylight’s analytics engine can be leveraged through integration or ingestion into other assurance or observability solutions. The granularity of the time-series based data and the real-time traffic visibility is the key in driving the next stages of closed-loop automation, self-driving and self-healing networks.
As Director of Product Management, Tom is responsible for the Accedian Skylight (now part of Cisco) product strategy, applying extensive knowledge of telecom industry software development to solve real-world problems in the software-defined network (SDN), cloud, and enterprise IT digital transformation areas. Prior to Cisco, he was VP of Product Line Management for Accedian and played a critical role in bringing the Accedian Skylight performance analytics solutions to life. He has more than two decades of product line management, systems engineering and R&D experience, and holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Carleton University.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today's IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 - for more information, visit here.
