As an organization offering services that rely on a satellite-based network, this firm has unique challenges when it comes to collecting and analyzing its network performance data. The main reason for this is the non-standard nature of its performance data.
What the firm needs to monitor goes far beyond the typical SNMP-based data that most companies rely on. To establish and maintain reliable connectivity with corporate and government assets in the world’s most remote locations, its satellite-based network utilizes a range of protocols and data types that are beyond the capabilities of traditional network monitoring systems.
In recent years, the firm’s Network Operations team had made several upgrades to its operational support systems (OSS) to both broaden and improve services available to customers and their challenging operations, such as cargo ships at sea, airliners in mid-flight and activities at the remotest of locations.
Despite these improvements, the team was still experiencing difficulties with gathering, normalizing and analyzing performance data. With its unusual operating environment and its array of disparate and non-standard data types, the team too often had to manually cobble together data from different subsystems in order to correlate it to a particular device or other network resource.
Simply put, the firm wanted a more efficient and effective way to collect and analyze all of its performance data so performance issues could be diagnosed and remediated quickly, before growing into customer-impacting events.
That’s when the team turned to IBM® SevOne® Network Performance Management (NPM).
The team had made earlier upgrades to its network performance and event management capabilities, including significant investments in the IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps solution. With IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, IT and the NetOps team get cross-domain correlation, enrichment and consolidation of high volumes of alerts and alarms and other operational data in a single dashboard.
The problem for the team wasn’t the analysis and subsequent remediation actions based on incoming alerts, alarms and other performance event data. Its fundamental challenge was getting all of its data into a single place and cohesive format so that it could then take advantage of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps’ strong capabilities. It was a problem that was familiar to the team, which faced real complexities when it tried to process and utilize all of its data, including its many non-standard data types in a unified manner.
SevOne NPM’s unmatched flexibility and scalability gave the team an effective way to get past its roadblock. Using a Kafka-based resource as a middle ground, SevOne NPM was able to take in a range of Kafka streams containing data in non-standard forms, including satellite-specific formats and IoT data. Once all the performance data was gathered via the Kafka/SevOne NPM tie-in, it could be ported it into IBM Netcool® Operations Insight software (now the Event Manager component of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps) seamlessly for rapid advances analysis and action.
Thanks to SevOne NPM's flexibility and scalability, the team had all of its performance data in one place and in a single, IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps-friendly format.
The firm supports clients who are serving billions of individuals across the world
With SevOne, the firm can see all its network performance data in 1 consolidated view
To gain further operational efficiencies around the management of network performance issues, the team effectively extended its SevOne and IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps approach with a two-way ServiceNow integration. ServiceNow is a cloud-based workflow automation platform that helps organizations to improve their operational efficiency and user experience by automating a range of IT service management tasks. Now, based on the comprehensive operational data flowing from SevOne into IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, ServiceNow could automatically generate incident tickets, track open and closed tickets and generate reports automatically.
For the team, the ServiceNow integration completed its automated, closed-loop system for network performance issue monitoring and management.
“This seamless integration of three top technologies got us right where we wanted to be,” said the team’s OSS Engineer. “We had all of our data—including the unwieldy types—in a single format and single location from which it could flow into Netcool Operations Insight for advanced analytics and visualization. All that was backstopped by the ServiceNow integration which, thanks to automation across the board, delivered big gains in both operational efficiency and effectiveness.”
In addition to using SevOne NPM to take in streams of data in both typical and atypical formats, the firm’s IT and NetOps teams also use SevOne NPM’s simple and reusable reporting and troubleshooting workflows to minimize service delivery risks and improve overall operations. But the uses didn’t stop there. After familiarizing themselves with SevOne NPM’s reporting capabilities, some of the firm’s salespeople began generating reports that detailed customers’ use of the firm’s services and highlighted places where more services made sense. These reports help several salespeople to close new and expanded service subscriptions with customers.
Based on their success with SevOne NPM to date, and particularly its integration with IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps and ServiceNow, the firm’s IT and NetOps team members are looking at other potential ways that this industry-leading network monitoring solution could help improve the services the firm provides to its customers. One possibility is more data-driven network capacity planning. Another is possibly using SevOne NPM to help achieve more intelligent, automated provisioning of network resources.
“SevOne NPM has been a key resource as we continue to up our OSS game,” said the team’s OSS Engineer. “With its great flexibility and scalability, there are innumerable ways it could help us to further enhance service quality and reliability moving forward. We’re already checking several of them out, and we’re looking forward to the next chapters of our story with SevOne NPM.”
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Produced in the United States of America, November 2022.
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