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By Roy Chua

Next-Generation Network Automation: Spotlight on Intent-Based Assurance

55.7B — the number of connected IoT devices by 2025 as estimated by IDC.

GSMA Intelligence estimates around 25B of those would be connected via cellular technologies. GSMA also forecasts ongoing growth, with an estimated 37.4B cellular IoT connections in 2030. That’s almost 5 cellular-connected IoT devices per human on earth (using UN estimates of a global population of 8.5B in 2030). Plus, with increased reliance on IoT and mobile connectivity by businesses and consumers, figuring out how to ensure quality-of-service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) for each and every one of those 37.4B is not a trivial task for network operators.

As the telco industry gears up to support the ongoing expansion of networked devices, we also need to rethink how we build networks. To succeed, we need to take a customer-first approach that focuses on the end-to-end experience. Ensuring end-to-end QoE is vital for network operators and managed service providers looking to succeed in a competitive marketplace.

Unfortunately, many networks today are still designed and built first, with assurance as an afterthought. More importantly, the assurance process continues to be manual. Network engineers take on the tasks of deciding probe placement, installing the probes, configuring telemetry on network devices, setting up data management pipelines, defining and calculating KPI metrics, and mapping those to service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) while setting trigger alerts — a multi-step, multi-day arduous process that can be error-prone. Thankfully, with recent advances in assurance and automation, these tasks can be eliminated, freeing up network engineers for higher value-add work. Let’s dig into how we can achieve that.

Roy Chua, Founder and Principal Analyst, AvidThink

Intent heralds the next shift in networking

Intent-based networking has made inroads into network management over the last decade. Intent-based frameworks, with roots in policy-based networking, were brought back into the spotlight with the advent of software-defined networking. In the past few years, technology maturity and advancements in AI/ML have made it possible for networking vendors to ship products with working intent systems.

Networking vendors have made early progress in data center switching, enterprise WiFi, and enterprise WAN. For example, we’re seeing functionality that takes high-level connectivity directives (e.g., “connect sites A, B, C ensuring a minimum of 1 Gbps in bandwidth, with 99% uptime, optimizing for cost”) and translates that into the configuration for routers, switches, and other network equipment. However, even leading vendors like Cisco acknowledge this journey to complete intent-based networking systems will take time.

Taking a different approach to assurance

Nevertheless, as network management shifts to intent-based frameworks, service assurance can use intent approaches to improve and automate assurance.

As described above, despite advances in service assurance technology, significant effort is required to assure an end-to-end service. Network operators face challenges that include manual and static instrumentation limitations, the inability to support dynamic networks, overhead in translating raw telemetry into KPIs, and the disconnect between network automation and service assurance.

An intent-based assurance approach can mitigate multiple challenges.

What is intent-based assurance?

An intent-based assurance system is a component of intent-based networking. It is responsible for monitoring network services and providing ongoing verification and visibility into the quality of service. The critical capabilities of this intent-based assurance system include the following:

  • Understanding the network elements that make up the service model.
  • Automatically placing probes for telemetry and active assurance.
  • Mapping active assurance and telemetry PM information to topology and other metadata categories
  • Providing both fixed SLA alerts and intelligent predictive alerts
  • Sending those alerts in real-time to an intent-based orchestration or SDN controller system for rapid remediation.

Intent-based assurance is a vital component of intent-based networking. It relies on a rich service model that captures key parameters of the network service, such as endpoints, constraints, and optimization goals.

The intent-based assurance system needs a translation engine to convert the service model into network elements, tests, telemetry stores, and analytics algorithms. The system also needs to support diverse monitoring from multi-vendor elements and may either provide its software agents and sensors for fast deployment or integrate external agents.

The system will depend on scalable data management and real-time analytics pipelines to handle the potentially massive data streams from multiple sensors across diverse network domains. Finally, the system will need a powerful analytics engine to translate telemetry into KPIs and user experience ratings.

Benefits of an intent-based approach to assurance

An intent-based assurance system offers benefits such as the faster deployment of assurance at the same time as service provisioning, reduced costs, increased scalability and intelligence, and improved network monitoring and remediation.

The system can track dynamic network provisioning and automatically scaling, reducing manual effort. Using AI/ML for predictive analytics provides early warnings of potential service degradation, avoiding financial penalties.

And by providing ongoing assurance metrics on service quality to the network controller, it can support the auto-remediation of issues impacting network services performance.

Reaping the benefits of intent in assurance today

One facet of intent-based assurance we haven’t yet discussed is its applicability to existing network automation systems that may not qualify as fully autonomous intent-based networking. Network operators may have network automation systems that provide smart provisioning based on a declarative model describing high-level services, but that doesn’t yet provide a closed-loop system that can monitor and auto-remediate upon deviation from desired SLO/SLA.

As long as the intent-based assurance system can consume and understand the input service model, it can determine the nature of the end-to-end service, topology, and equipment capabilities. It can also autonomously choose how and where to place probes and configure telemetry. Likewise, it can determine KPI calculation, QoS/QoE metrics mapping, and alert when things go awry. With appropriate APIs, it can trigger the automation system to take remediation action or at least notify network operators. Basic network automation and traditional assurance can no longer keep up with today’s networks. We believe it’s worth piloting new intent-based assurance systems to determine their fit for your network use cases. Whether playing a role as part of an intent-based system or integrated with an existing network automation system, an intent-based assurance solution can add immediate value.

Learn more about intent-based assurance

To dig deeper into intent-based assurance and how it can improve customer experience, download the new Research Brief from AvidThink, Cisco, and Accedian, “Intent-Based Assurance: Ensuring end-to-end service quality at scale”.