The Telco Cloud Operations tier supports centralized data monitoring and logging for the telco cloud solution.
The Telco Cloud Operations tier monitors the Physical, Infrastructure, and Platform tiers. It collects information about various operations to provide observability into the platform efficiency and insights into networking infrastructure and Kubernetes clusters.
VMware vRealize suite is being rebranded to VMware Aria suite. Throughout this Telco Cloud Reference Architecture guide, the Aria naming convention is used.
VMware Bare Metal Automation for VMware Telco Cloud Platform automates the provisioning and configuration of physical servers, including server configuration and imaging.
The Operations Tier is optional in the Telco Cloud. In addition to existing components such as Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations), Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight), new components such as Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Network Insight), Telco Cloud Service Assurance, and Bare Metal Automation are added to the Telco Cloud Platform.
Aria Operations for Networks
Aria Operations for Networks is a network monitoring tool that collects and analyzes operational information about network data sources such as NSX, vSphere, Kubernetes deployments, and so on. Users can access this information through dashboards.
Aria Operations for Networks provides capabilities for application discovery, application visibility, and enhanced troubleshooting capabilities by collecting and analyzing inventory, metadata, and flow telemetry of the infrastructure traffic using sFlow/IPFIX. Aria Operations for Networks provides detailed traffic distribution patterns and real-time views of network traffic and patterns.
Major use-cases and benefits of Aria Operations for Networks:
Application Discovery and visibility
Security and migration planning
Visual troubleshooting aids for day 2 operations
Aria Operations for Networks is an optional component and is leveraged as a SaaS service or on-premise for any Telco Cloud deployment.
The telco cloud reference architecture supports only the on-premise version of Aria Operations for Networks.
Aria Operations for Logs
Aria Operations for Logs collects unstructured data from the Telco Cloud Platform by using the syslog protocol. It has the following capabilities:
Connects to other VMware products such as vCenter Server and ESXi hosts to collect events, tasks, and alarm data.
Integrates with Aria Operations to send notification events and enable launch in context.
Functions as a collection and analysis point for any system that sends syslog data.
To collect additional logs, you can install an ingestion agent on Linux or Windows servers or use the preinstalled agent on specific VMware products. Preinstalled agents are useful for custom application logs and operating systems such as Windows that do not natively support the syslog protocol.
As the Kubernetes and Container adoptions are increasing in the Telco Cloud, Aria Operations for Logs can also be the centralized log management platform for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. Cloud Administrators can easily configure container logs to forward to Aria Operations for Logs using industry-standard Open-Source log agents such as FluentD and Fluentbit. Any logs that the container pod writes to standard output (stdout) are sent to Aria Operations for Logs by the log agent, with no changes to the CNF.
Aria Operations
VMware Aria Operations is a unified AI-powered self-driving operations management platform for Private, Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud environments. It tracks and analyzes the operations of multiple data sources using specialized analytic algorithms. These algorithms help Aria Operations learn and predict the behavior of every object it monitors.
Aria Operations supports collecting information through additional management packs. Some management packs are native to Aria Operations and others are add-ons to provide relevant, contextual information about the Telco cloud components. The recommended management packs include:
vSphere and vSAN
NSX
Cloud Director
Kubernetes Management Pack
Users access the information ingested by Aria operations by using views, reports, and dashboards. Aria Operations is customizable to suit the telco cloud operations requirements, and it supports the creation of custom reports and dashboards.
Bare Metal Automation
VMware Bare Metal Automation is a bare metal provisioning platform used to deploy and bootstrap the server with the appropriate OS, in the case of the Telco Cloud Bare Metal Automation is used to deploy and configure ESXi on the customer server of choice.
In addition to ESXi deployment, Bare Metal Automation performs server BIOS configuration management and ensures the deployment of correct firmware revisions to the BIOS, Network Interface Cards, and other components within the server.
VMware Bare Metal Automation provides end-to-end server automation. Workflows can be connected to other Telco Cloud components such as VMware Telco Cloud Automation to continue the deployment process after the Bare Metal provisioning process is completed.
Telco Cloud Service Assurance
VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance is a holistic service assurance solution that allows Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and large enterprises to monitor and manage both the traditional physical infrastructure and new virtual and containerized network services together. The micro-services architecture enables flexibility and scale in VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance.
Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides end-to-end service assurance capabilities across multiple domains including the Network underlay, the virtualized infrastructure, and service level monitoring of the 5G Core and RAN applications
VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides an automated approach to operational intelligence to reduce operational expenses, increase uptime, meet SLAs, and operationalize new services faster. It automatically discovers the topology of a complex, multivendor network including the physical, virtual, and services layers, and presents the user with a comprehensive, graphical topology view.
VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides the following capabilities:
Single pane of glass providing the CSP Operations teams with rapid insights
Automated root-cause analysis across service, physical, and virtualized networks
Auto-discovery of physical and virtual topologies
Dashboard and reporting
RAN assurance to consume fault and metric data from the RAN environment
Closed-loop remediation to take automated actions on infrastructure and service failures
Data collector SDK to allow the addition of custom CNF collectors
Observability for TCA pipelines results
