Overcoming the Challenges of Managing Network Performance and End Users' Quality of Experience

Whether it's dependable voice connectivity or real-time access to data and content, today's end users expect high performance services. It's imperative that communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises provide the best quality of service possible because with every failed call or download, CSPs, in particular, risk losing customers and revenue. In order to survive and succeed in today's competitive landscape, they must find a way to ensure consistent, end-to-end network performance and high-quality services-and a high quality of experience for end users.

But, there are many challenges that need to be overcome to achieve this. First, managing today's complex, all-IP / Ethernet backhaul networks and the continued increase in data traffic and demand for bandwidth without over sizing or over spending on network infrastructure is difficult. CSPs and enterprises must also forgo traditional, silo-oriented network and service quality management practices. By doing so, they can gain visibility and increase collaboration among organizational teams, which hinders the timely resolution of end-user issues and the planning needed to withstand future traffic growth, sustain performance of network and accelerate new service use.

CSPs and enterprises without the ability to correlate service performance quality to the service and network topology and enhance the value of communications services via service level agreement (SLA) reporting will not be able to ensure the best possible performance and service quality. They instead need to be flexible and agile and, for instance, be able to mine value-added and vendor-agnostic key performance indicators (KPIs) and key quality indicators (KQIs) from hundreds or thousands of varied yet valuable raw counters provided by infrastructure vendors, to gain critical performance intelligence.

CSPs and enterprises can overcome these challenges and effectively manage end users' quality of experience they demand with the right network performance management platform. They need a robust, end-to-end solution that provides a holistic understanding of their services and cross-domain visibility into the resources supporting their delivery. At the same time, they should gain a comprehensive ability to observe and pre-emptively fix issues impacting performance and, in turn, services, figure out from which underlying network resources the service issues are arising, as well as frequently evaluate quality of service and quality of experience.

The right network management platform can help CSPs and enterprises gain critical insight into end users' service and application use to map out their infrastructure needs, collaborate with product management and marketing in the launch of new services, and deploy the means needed to see through their network performance promises. These network management 'must haves' will especially enable CSPs to more successfully manage customers' expectations, generate profits and remain competitive down the road.

InfoVista provides end-to-end network performance management with network performance monitoring, network performance reporting and capacity planning.

Article Source: EzineArticles