Over the last years, the Internet has extremely changed. From a hierarchical Tier-1, Tier-2 and Tier-3 topology it has evolved more and more towards a mesh up of directly interconnected networks. Driven by higher quality demands, lower transit cost and lower network cost, content providers worked on shortening the AS-path by positioning the content as close as possible to the consumer. Content delivery networks (CDNs) started to develop enhanced algorithms to choose the “best” or at least a better path to the user. In a nutshell: the Internet is becoming an increasingly complex physical and logical structure of networks.
Every participant of the internet supply chain from the content, to the CDN, to the upstream provider, to the transit provider, to the ISP to the end user and vice versa has an influence on quality, reachability and security of content. To ensure quality and detect risks ISPs monitor and record different sources of data by utilizing various tools.
BENOCS’ idea is to leverage these information sources in a totally new way based on the principles of completeness, transparency and simplicity. We have developed a multi-dimensional collector that stores all the different sources in a single place and correlates them to gain new and deeper insights of one’s network.
Analytics is not new. Present tools on the market are used for specific questions, often some of them are misappropriated to gain “deeper” insights in a foreign domain (accepting the inherent risks of the constraints and misleading assumptions). However, in the past two major problems prevailed. The first was the amount of data and different systems. The BENOCS collector solves this problem and allows gathering information of all different kinds of protocols (e.g. IS-IS, OSPF, SNMP, BGP, DNS, Netflow, …) in real-time. The second problem refers to processing and correlation. BENOCS Analytics is driven by real-world use cases that departments of network operators, quality assurance, planning & forecasting and sales & support actually have. In fact, we believe the rise of analytics will be so rapid and dramatic that many network professionals will wonder how they once had to go along without this set of capabilities.
Being able to answer the following questions in real-time will be the USP of next generation ISPs:
“Are subscribers having trouble with video services like YouTube, Netflix or Amazon? Which users in what locations are affected? Is it caused by an internal or external network? What could be done to solve it?”
Using the power of network analytics and developing a sophisticated intelligence are mandatory to deal with the above more-variables-than-equations types of problems. Analytics can thus literally pay for itself – both in cost savings and quality increase, as well as revenue increase.