Monitoring

Customer Presentation Sierra Wireless is an Internet-of-Things market leader indexed on NASDAQ with a revenue of over 600M USD. Its device-to-cloud integrated solutions make their offer unique in the market. Sierra Wireless Smart SIM is now used in a wide variety of connected objects leveraging its global connectivity. Customer Critical Challenge Sierra Wireless needs a robust and global monitoring platform for its mobile core networks. Main challenges: Gain visibility on the network health and partners’ incident impact Be proactive for incident management Have a single pane of glass view for the different networks Solution Central monitoring solution for the network infrastructure and related applications Distributed setup for remote data collection involving multiple datacenters in two continents Custom monitoring modules to extract and present Key Performance Indicators from the core network nodes Benefits Sierra Wireless’ IoT network services are reliable Dimensioning and capacity management is based on real data observations Incident management and provider SLA enforcing is efficient Business Challenge Sierra Wireless has a set of Mobile Virtual Networks (MVNO) as part of their horizontal solutions for the IoT market. These disparate networks, having similarities and being managed by the same teams need a centralized platform for its monitoring. The latter should act as a source for SLA and management reporting needs. As part of providing better quality of service and enabling efficient incident management processes, Sierra Wireless needs to be proactive about its network health and have it monitored tightly in 24/7 by a Network Operations Center (NOC). The telco world is a closed one with each vendor providing less than optimal monitoring interfaces to ensure that its respective management solution is the best suited for its own equipment. For the mobile operations, this creates an incomplete view with the inability to aggregate and correlate incidents seen from the different nodes. In the end, the NOC technician simply does not know which dashboard to look at. With the current virtualization trends on both telco and IP worlds, the network infrastructure becomes relies more on off-the-shelf servers and IT virtualization solutions such as VMware or Openstack. This means that for an efficient and global visibility should include all the different levels that the business relies upon. On top of this complexity, leveraging public clouds while keeping private ones in owned datacenters adds more complexity as applications assurance must consider both parts. Zen Networks Solution As part of our offering, we have a modular monitoring architecture that can be adapted to the exact needs of our clients. These solutions provide the required visibility and enables ITIL-compliant processes. As a matter of fact, our architecture includes Different monitoring solutions adaptable to the size and complexity of the target infrastructure Developed monitoring modules to enable automatic discovery and monitoring of customer application components Reporting solutions to build KPI dashboards based on the monitoring data Ticketing systems for event management (incident, problem, change…) Integrating inhouse or off-the-self solutions is never enough to provide real insight about an IT infrastructure. For this reason, our solution is two-fold. In addition to building the right architectural blocks, we assess the specific needs of our clients and have our developers work in tandem with our monitoring experts to provide a better experience with solutions developed specifically to adapt to the customer’s applications. Result By leveraging our monitoring stack and our development expertise, Sierra Wireless has been able to build a scalable and global platform used by both technical and non-technical users. The platform is fully adapted to Sierra Wireless network and its technical needs where new services are automatically discovered and monitored. This agility enables fast service deployment and validation by ensuring the service key performance indicators are green. The platform is also instrumental to managing vendors by keeping track of their quality of service and providing proof of their digression as part of support and SLA management. By having different threshold sensitivities, the telecom operator can be proactive about critical issues and take action before any customer impact. Lastly, many dashboards are built for the different usages and teams. In fact, these dashboards answer different needs such as SLA reporting, NOC view, capacity planning, IP weather map, Telco signaling KPI…