NetScout Systems announced the extension of its nGeniusONE Unified Performance Management platform to service providers, delivering next generation service assurance and operational intelligence capabilities for data, multi-generational voice and video service delivery environments.

Extending NetScout’s data analysis capabilities, the nGeniusONE platform provides comprehensive support for mobile and fixed line voice services, including Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE), Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Voice over IP (VoIP) and legacy circuit switched voice deployments.

“Operators are facing increasing pressure to deliver high quality services because poor performance impacts customer satisfaction and increases the risk of churn. Operators need actionable insight into both performance and usage to support real-time performance management and identify trends that can lead to revenue expansion opportunities,” said Patrick Kelly, research director, Analysys Mason. “NetScout is well positioned to extend their operational value beyond traditional service assurance to real-time operational intelligence and customer experience management capabilities that can support a wider range of use cases in an operator’s organization.”

The nGeniusONE platform provides mobile, wireline and cable operators with a top-down, service-centric perspective of networks, services, devices and subscribers into a single-pane-of glass, addressing the requirements of multiple operations groups, including network operations, service management, customer support and planning teams.

The nGeniusONE platform combines extensive real-time and historical analysis capabilities for a more proactive approach to managing the performance, availability and quality of diverse revenue generating services. Leveraging NetScout’s patented Adaptive Session Intelligence (ASI) technology, the nGeniusONE platform monitors data and control plane traffic and correlates data, signaling and service enabler performance metrics to reveal critical interactions and interdependencies that affect service performance.

The nGeniusONE platform enables powerful, vendor-independent analysis across multi-technology network domains including the packet and circuit core, IMS core, service enablers, and access networks.

The nGeniusONE platform dramatically simplifies managing complex service delivery environments and empowers operators with actionable intelligence to proactively identify which service and which network element is impacting which users, to quickly identify, triage and resolve performance issues that impact service quality and the user experience.

Proactive Management with Intelligent Early Warning Improves Service Levels

Designed to support assuring the delivery of next generation services over next generation networks, an integrated Service Dashboard automates analysis and diagnostic activities with a real-time holistic view of network and service status on a national, regional and market level, providing top-down context of the end-to-end network and dramatically improving visibility scale for tier-one operators.

Monitored domains may be customized based upon physical and logical attributes, and combinations of applications, services, physical sites, geographic regions, or user communities.

Key Performance, Error and Service Indicators (KPIs, KEIs and KSIs), and automated anomaly detection provides Intelligent Early Warning to proactively identify emerging performance issues before large numbers of users are affected.

Modern workflows streamline analysis and enable rapid assessment of service behavior characteristics, including service evocation, throughput, responsiveness and latency.

Complementing NetScout’s top-down analysis paradigm, nGeniusONE provides deep-dive subscriber, session and packet level granularity, allowing operators to zoom into specific groups of users, or a single user’s session to support advanced diagnostic requirements.

Comprehensive Support for Voice Services

The nGeniusONE platform supports both packet and circuit switched voice services enabling the analysis of subscriber voice sessions from beginning to end, regardless of the network technology or service delivery method used for the call.

The nGeniusONE platform assesses voice and network quality, interconnection and connection success rates along with signaling traffic to measure attachment, registration and call control functions.

Extensive IP device and subscriber identity awareness enables operators to track performance levels for different device types (iPhone, Samsung devices, Tablets, etc.) and by user communities to analyze usage and usability trends, and proactively identify performance, compatibility or attachability issues that affect the user experience.

For 4G/LTE mobile networks, the nGeniusONE platform supports next generation voice services, including VoLTE, IMS and Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) architectures. This allows mobile operators to assess interoperability, roaming and hand-overs between IP multi-generational voice sessions and analyze inter-domain performance, connection, and data transfer events that enable LTE-based mobile communication services.

Comprehensive Cloud and Data Center Monitoring

Using the same nGeniusONE platform and nGenius InfiniStream appliance investment, operators can leverage high-performance, enterprise-class Network and Application Performance Management (NPM/APM) capabilities to support data center and cloud application service monitoring requirements.

The nGeniusONE platform correlates application and network performance metrics across application and server tiers within the data center, providing deep visibility into application performance, transaction latency, service requests, and load, new and active application sessions, as well as correlated application and network errors. Consequently the nGeniusONE platform is the only Service Provider assurance platform that provides a complete end-to-end view of service delivery, from the data center to the user, eliminating the need for operators to purchase and deploy a separate APM solution.

Rich Operational Intelligence Improves Operational Efficiency
Harnessing the Big Data intelligence contained in network traffic, the nGeniusONE platform delivers an impressive range of operational intelligence that supports diverse operations teams and business requirements for Customer Experience Management (CEM) reporting.

With a deep view into services, cross-domain networks, devices and user activity, the nGeniusONE platform allows operators to proactively optimize network and service performance, improve capacity planning capabilities by identifying under- or over-utilized infrastructure, and assess technology interoperability to validate OEM systems performance. Flexible and highly contextualized insight enables operators to accelerate new service or technology rollouts and effectively define and tune policies.

Service-level granularity enables operators to track performance of specific markets, device usage, partner services, web site traffic, and analyze Over the Top (OTT) service consumption to better understand their customer base and target new service offerings that can be monetized. Consequently, leveraging the same metrics used for Service Assurance allows operators to consolidate management tools and monitoring probes to greatly reduce CAPEX and OPEX while improving data consistency and quality, enhancing operational agility and decision making.

Powered by Next-Generation Adaptive Session Intelligence Technology

The nGeniusONE platform is powered by NetScout’s ASI Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine that exploits the richness of packet-flow data to provide a deep and highly contextualized view of service, application and network traffic.

ASI technology performs real-time data mining of all network traffic as it crosses the wire enabling massive scale that supports monitoring and analysis across large, distributed networks comprised of hundreds of geographic locations, millions of users, thousands of services and billions of session transactions per hour. Its distributed processing architecture increases the depth and speed of analysis, eliminating the need for middleware or aggregation servers. ASI technology supports 40 and 100 Gigabit network links by overcoming the physical limitations associated with capturing, recording, and analyzing packet-flow data for very high traffic and transaction volumes.

Architected for extensibility, ASI technology enables rapid support for new protocols, applications and next-generation technologies such as Software Defined Networks (SDN), IPv6, adaptive video and Web-RCS.

“In the high-demand mobile world, user experience is king, and users are demanding faster access with increasing expectations for higher reliability and service quality. One bad customer experience can do real damage. But when it affects a sizable portion of your customer base, it can rapidly spin out of control,” said Steven Shalita, VP Marketing at NetScout. “The introduction of nGeniusONE strengthens our technology leadership in the service provider market by allowing operators to implement a more proactive management strategy. Extensive network, service and user insight enables operators to proactively identify and resolve performance degradations to deliver consistent, high quality service levels, reducing the risk of customer churn. The extensibility of the nGeniusONE platform delivers extensive operational intelligence to improve organizational efficiency, make better business decisions, expand customer loyalty and improve the profitability of services delivered.”

The nGeniusONE Unified Performance Management platform is available now. Existing nGenius Service Assurance Solution customers under MasterCare agreements are eligible to receive no-cost upgrades to the nGeniusONE platform. The nGeniusONE platform is fully integrated with the nGenius Subscriber Intelligence module enabling seamless, context-linked workflows between the two analysis platforms. Please contact NetScout or a NetScout authorized reseller for more information.

NetScout will be showcasing the new nGeniusONE platform at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 24 - 27, 2014 – booth number 6K50.