TM Forum Community

  • 1.  multi-vendor service chain

    Posted Sep 24, 2017 20:44
    In Enterprise and sole provider carrier networks, a contiguous network topology allows for automated topology discovery, and root cause fault correlation across the network transport model, as well root cause fault detection across the full stack Application/compute/storage/access/network model.

    In an NFV/SDN multi-vendor service chain, how does TM Forum plan to maintain the ability to perform root cause fault correlation from end to end? I.E. when intermediate services fail in the service chain, how do you pinpoint the transport service failure/owner/component when multiple entities/companies only provide one or more pieces of the service chain?

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    David Redwine
    Ai4Cloud
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  • 2.  RE: multi-vendor service chain

    Posted Sep 25, 2017 02:45
    ​The problem of RCA (root-cause-analysis) is a real challenge: in my opinion, the only way to correlate applications/services to the underlining infrastructure is to have an "entity" providing information about "which service is running on which VM".

    Probably the only "entity" with such knowledge is the Service Orchestrator but...what is "a service" ?  Thinking to a Virtual EPC, it can be composed by many VM each implementing a component (MME, P/Gw, HSS, PCRF...) that should be mapped on the respective piece of hardware.

    A "VoLTE service" requires many other components to run (I am referring to the logical components, like vEPC and vIMS), increasing the complexity of determining if a fault in the lower hardware is affecting (and how) the overall service, or the RCA of a possible quality degradation. Example is the following: I can easily detect a decreased MOS related to the voice quality  but find the RCA an be extremely challenging...

    BR


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    Angelo Baccarani
    Product Manager - NFV Service Assurance
    Empirix - Italy
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: multi-vendor service chain

    Posted Sep 26, 2017 05:19
    ​I agree with the description of 'challenging'. That is, discovering the set of capabilities which happened to be supporting a service at some point in the past (when perhaps it had a problem). There seems to be agreement that we should measure everything - which provides the raw data but it is not clear to me how the data can be processed to obtain the instantaneous service chain. ONAP work on orchestration appears to include this function rather than using an inventory per se. It seems to me that the problem is more acute for network service providers than for other IT operators because topology is fundamental to networks.

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    Paul Jordan

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    Original Message