The Visibility Evolution: Supporting the Growth Potential of 5G SA

The Visibility Evolution: Supporting the Growth Potential of 5G SA

Cloud-native infrastructure requires end-through-end observability

Due to its innovative cloud-native design, 5G standalone (5G SA) offers tremendous promise for communications service providers (CSPs), opening the door to critically important new capabilities, such as slicing and open APIs, that hold the potential for greater monetization of investments. The new network paradigm can deliver on this vision by allowing quick network and service reconfigurations while progressively automating network operations.

Although a cloud-native design has significant advantages, it also is highly complex, creating real challenges when it comes to network and application visibility, because east-west encrypted communications in a microservice-based architecture must be instrumented.

To meet the needs of 5G SA, an evolution in observability is required. CSPs will need visibility into three distinct layers of their architecture, including:

• The infrastructure layer, which requires flexibility and a dynamic environment in order to deploy resources and workloads
• The network layer, which offers a breadth of functions and capabilities, as well as integration with existing technologies, all of which create significant complexity
• The service layer, which holds the potential for further monetization opportunities via innovations such as open APIs and slicing

The Growing Importance of Visibility Across All Layers

As CSPs roll out 5G SA, many are deploying network functions as microservice-based workloads on cloud-native environments, which gives them the agility and automation for quick network reconfiguration and service creation and management. This holds tremendous monetization potential, but it also creates significant challenges, because packet visibility is often lost inside the cloud.

5G SA introduces a core network layer with a new service-based architecture. Because of the dual nature of the 5G core, which consists of dual-stack 4G and 5G cloud-native nodes, the metadata driving observability and analytics requires the tracking of signaling across the different stacks. Visibility into this environment holds a potential treasure trove of information. CSPs can leverage this data not only to assure and secure the network, but also to power analytics for smart data monetization.

Once CSPs have the foundation of infrastructure and network functions, they can begin to look at the service layer running on top of the network, as well as those exposed to third parties, enterprises, and developers. This would include services such as voice evolving to Voice over New Radio (VoNR), which present unique challenges and a greater need for visibility in order to address problems more quickly.

Another area where visibility will be required is with 5G SA network slicing. With the introduction of slicing, different services, as well as different enterprises, will be able to receive a dedicated end-to-end virtual network (a slice) that can be dynamically allocated and managed based on the specific needs and requirements. With the right monitoring solution, CSPs will gain visibility into all dimensions and metrics for the different services and requirements associated with each slice, which is essential for assuring performance, following the complete lifecycle of a given slice.

Future-Proofing 5G with the Right Monitoring Solution

Implementing the right monitoring solution is instrumental for future-proofing 5G ecosystems. NETSCOUT's 5G SA solution is a proactive monitoring and reporting application that is based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and provides 24/7 monitoring in near real time with proactive alarming capabilities. This powerful 5G solution delivers the visibility needed to empower CSPs to understand which parts of the network, network elements, or functions are affected and which services are impacted by any performance degradation. The solution extends visibility at all different layers of a cloud-native 5G core architecture and delivers a unique scalable data model across all the components of a CSP network, including legacy network nodes running on dedicated hardware.

Armed with the network insights made possible by NETSCOUT's solution, CSPs can begin to realize the full potential of 5G SA and put themselves on a path toward achieving important monetization objectives.

Click here to explore NETSCOUT's 5G SA solution further.