How to hold service providers accountable for network performance

When networks do not meet their guaranteed level of performance, businesses suffer.

Poor network performance can eat into productivity while employees wait for applications or they stop working entirely, it can slow down the speed of business, it can cut revenue—and it can hurt a company’s brand reputation.

This cost of poor network performance is why communications service providers (CSPs) offer service level agreements (SLA) to ensure network performance meets the agreed targets and issues are not caused by the service provider network. Unfortunately, CSPs do not always hit their SLA targets—and businesses are unable to notice these breaches or prove when a service provider is at fault.

One reason that service provider SLAs are not always consistently met is oversubscription of network resources.

The CSP oversubscription problem

If you consistently travel for business, you understand the issue of oversubscription on an emotional level from its use in the airline industry. You show up for your flight and discover you don’t actually have a seat on the plane. But wait a minute. I bought a ticket so why don’t I have a seat?

This frequent occurrence in the airline industry is because airlines oversubscribe their flights to maximize resources. They intentionally allow more customers to book seats than are available on the plane, hoping some passengers will cancel or miss their flight. Often this oversubscription works out and passengers do cancel or miss their flight—but sometimes they do not, and when they don’t someone is forced to miss that flight no matter how badly they need to be on it..

The same thing takes place with service provider network resources. It is no secret that CSPs oversubscribe their network resources with the expectation that businesses will not actually use all the network resources they are guaranteed. Often this oversubscription works out, and businesses fail to use all the network resources they are entitled—but sometimes they do use them, and when all the businesses need the resources at the same time, someone if not everyone suffers from poor experience, missed business goals, and dissatisfied customers.

The end result of this CSP oversubscription is poor network performance that adversely affects the business.

Unlike getting bumped to a new flight at the airport, however, businesses often are unable to notice a CSP’s breach in service delivery. Due to the complexity of modern networks, CSP service level breaches can hide among other culprits: company network issues, application performance issues, issues with other service providers that also are used within the company.

Even if a business takes the time to discover the root cause of a network issue and understands that the problem is taking place on the CSP level, it can be hard to prove it to the CSP and get adequate resolution and SLA remediation. The blame game is alive and well when it comes to network performance issues.

Visibility: holding service providers accountable

The inability to hold service providers accountable is a visibility issue. Modern networks are complex, and teasing out the root cause of a network performance issue can be hard to spot or prove.

Network visibility is a greater challenge than ever before because of several reasons.

• Business often relies on a range of cloud applications provided by different vendors—almost none of which give adequate visibility on the network layer.
• Businesses are more global, often with offices and workers that are supported by CSPs in different geographical locations.
• Technologies such as software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) and edge networks bring flexibility and advantages, but add complexity and visibility issues.
• Then there is also the issue that not all traffic is equal—class of service depends on the importance of the application (a slow-loading spreadsheet is less important than time-sensitive data to an assembly line device), and monitoring performance by class of service can be hard.

To hold CSPs accountable for network issues that stem from oversubscription or other problems on their network, businesses need a network performance monitoring solution that can see all parts of the network and easily show where slowdowns are actually occurring.

Key requirements for network visibility

Not all network visibility is created equal. A CSP might provide key performance indicators that service levels are being met, but these KPIs are not granular enough or leave out important measurements that can reveal that a network issue actually is taking place on the CSP level.

One example is polling network performance on a one-minute interval. This level of granularity might show that the CSP is delivering on SLA requirements. TheCSP network might be having micro-outages that get missed if performance is not monitored on the sub-second level, however. To the business, there’s a network problem. To the CSP’s dashboard, the problem is not with them even though it actually is an issue with the CSP’s network.

So all network visibility is not created equal. To properly diagnose network issues and hold CSPs accountable, businesses need a robust network performance monitoring solution that includes:

• End-to-end traffic visibility along the entire length of the network to spot where problems actually are occurring.
• Sub-second network granularity to uncover micro-outages.
• Data aggregation combined with granularity to define root cause easily but also drill down as needed.
• Real-time monitoring and notification to catch issues as they develop.
• Proactive testing so service levels can be tested before they are relied upon.

Learn how Accedian Skylight brings the visibility to hold CSPs accountable

Accedian Skylight brings this level of network visibility so businesses can hold ISPs accountable for SLA performance.

For a deeper look at the problem of CSP network performance breaches and a quick demo that shows exactly how Accedian Skylight can bring the needed visibility to identify them, watch our short webinar: SLA Assurance: Here’s how you can hold SPs accountable.