Datacentre network assurance

The reliability of Data Centre connectivity is a business-critical issue.

For those with responsibility for running Data Centres, finding connectivity issues ahead of end users is extremely important in order to reduce operational costs and lower customer churn levels. Many businesses simply cannot wait for an engineer to travel to a site with test equipment

If you are operating Data Centres, either for your own use, or as a managed service, you will be aware that there are many different failure scenarios to consider.  If you are providing power, rack space and connectivity, the toughest issue to monitor is usually connectivity, since it is outside your physical premise and has potentially multiple paths and providers.

A customer reported issue can have many possible root causes

There are many possible root causes, when the customer reports an issue.  At this point, the situation may demand:

1. Advising the customer to take some standard steps to attempt to self heal locally
2. Finally accepting the issue is real and hand over to network operations.
3. Interpreting a customer reported description “Access to Teams is slow!”, to physical infrastructure.
4. Physical presence at each site, taking various handheld test gear
5. Interaction with the customer to help debug an issue
6. Issue discovery
7. Remedial actions
8. Re-advise the customer to test.

All the way through to step 6 above, the customer is facing a reduced experience and likely a failure to meet an SLA.  There is a well established correlation between user experience and likelihood to leave a service provider. Having poor ability to isolate issues will:

1. Increase your costs to diagnose customer reported issues
2. Increase your customer churn rate.
3. Provide a competitor with a new opportunity to win business

Best in class companies :

1. Fix issues BEFORE customers are even aware of problems
2. Let software instantly find issues
3. Use software to locate root couse of issues
4. Work remotely to avoid unnecessary and costly truck rolls
5. Use automation where possible to decrease Mean Time To Repair “MTTR” further, and decrease the chance for human error

Netrounds active assurance

Netrounds Active Assurance solution is an ideal solution for assuring datacenter connectivity. Netrounds light weight software Test Agents are deployed around a network and continuously test connectivity. The Test Agents report results back to a Control Centre, which also acts as a single integration point.