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.

VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance components and their functions

VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance enables Telco operators to manage and operate their 5G network and services from a single pane of glass. It provides:
  • Cross-domain visibility of the entire 5G RAN service stack, from the underlay infrastructure to the service, and supporting integration with NFV and RAN orchestrators for RAN auto discovery.
  • Comprehensive health and performance monitoring from the RAN to the Core network, including network slice mapping.
  • Just-in-time Root Cause Analysis that can identify the cause of service loss or degradation across multiple domains and a multi-vendor stack.
  • Mission-critical impact analysis to enable you to prioritize remediation and resolution based on, for example, the number of impacted customers or SLA requirements.
  • Closed-loop automation and remediation with prescriptive RCA and monitoring insights provided to management and orchestration tools.
VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance consists of multiple components and their functions are:
Components Description
Domain Manager Components Following components are used in VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance:
  • SAM: The Service Assurance Manager (SAM) solution automatically correlates topology and event data from multiple managed domains to diagnose root-cause problems.
  • IP: The IP networks are composed of thousands of interconnected devices. Any outage can cause alarms on the console. To provide the actionable information must sustain service, management solutions must automate the function such as discovery, modeling, and RCA.
  • ESM: The Server Manager (ESM) works with the IP Manager and the SAM to discover, monitor, and analyze the availability and performance of the environmental and software elements.
Gateway VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance Gateway is a component that acts as an entry point to ingest metric data from an external system (M&R Gateway and Smarts Gateway) to VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance.
Operation UI The Operation UI is a versatile tool for monitoring and reporting performance data, topology data, and fault notifications for all aspects of your infrastructure. The Operation UI has modules that collect, aggregate, and insert data into one or more databases that the portal uses to display reports.
Reporting The reporting allows you to create, modify, and delete the improvised performance metric dashboards and reports for the supported data models.
Alarming The VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides alarms to call your attention to events that can potentially affect performance and system operation. Alarms provide detailed event information such as which component is affected, the type of event, and then recommends a corrective action.
Analytics The Baseline and Anomaly detection analytics solution in VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance provides a performance monitoring and learning approach for the active operations management.
Mapper The mapper is a utility where, an administrator can map an external model to the internal model.
Enrich Enriches and tags data collected by the Data Collector Service with externally provided reference data.
Collectors Manages the lifecycle of Kafka, SNMP, REST and other collectors, which ingest the data into VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance through push and pull mechanisms.
  • Event: The event datastore is a processing system which reads the Notifications that SAM Domain Manager publishes. It processes the notifications and persists into back-end Elastic Search Database.
  • Metrics: The metrics collect the data from the configured domain manager.
  • Topology: The domain manager builds a topology of the managed entities. The topology represents the managed elements in the network, their relationships, and their connections.
5G Integration With the 5G Integration feature, you can configure Virtualized Infrastructure Managers (VIM), Orchestrator, Physical layers, and Kafka Collector and Metrics Mapping to measure traffic flow across the network and collect events and metrics data.
5G Integration consists of the following layers:
  • VIM and Kubernetes: VIM and Kubernetes layer contains NSX-T, vCenter, VIO, and vCloud Director configurations, and the CaaS infrastructure includes the VMware vROps configuration.
  • Orchestrator: The Orchestrator layer contains the NFV-SOL configuration.
  • Physical Layer: The Physical Layer contains the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) that measures traffic flowing across the network.
  • Metrics Mapping and Kafka Collector: The Metrics Mapping and Kafka Collector layer contains events and metrics mapper configuration.