The Benefits of Full Observability & Potent Analytics for Enterprise Networks

Enterprises are accelerating towards becoming networked, digital, and intelligent. As the foundation of digital infrastructure, network connectivity plays an increasingly important role in promoting digital transformation across industries. 

The total number of global connections is likely to reach 200 billion by 2030, as networks evolve from connecting tens of billions of people to connecting hundreds of billions of things. New services, such as next-generation human-machine interaction, housing and transportation integration, industrial interconnection, and AI computing are raising new requirements for network connections. To keep up, the network needs to develop towards being automated and intelligent, with a series of key features, including: 

• Native intelligence
• Holographic visibility
• Deterministic experience
• High security and reliability
• Integrated sensing

When a network stops working, key parts of any enterprise's business may come to a standstill, which may have dire consequences. Network operators must understand the relationships between devices and the paths that applications take across the network in real time.
However, today's networks have exploded due to the rapid growth of services, virtualization, and cloud services. Traditional networks, which used to rely on manual drawing management, collaboration, and single-area management, rely entirely on manual drawing. The status of network elements (NEs) was maintained and managed through the configuration management database (CMDB).

Common problems included:

• Network connections
• Devices going online, offline, or being replaced
• Delayed status updates. 
• NEs relied heavily on manual maintenance and lacked full and accurate system-level management. 
• Limited by topology drawing and collection accuracy, heterogeneous multi-vendor systems were managed independently, making it difficult to present a complete network picture
• A lack of system-level network full-picture visualization methods. 
• Multiple data islands, massive static and uncorrelated data
• Siloed O&M

The lack of a unified view that can centrally display the enterprise network health leads to a poor network experience, numerous complaints about network faults, and a low efficiency of fault rectification. As such, network O&M will hamper the digital transformation pace of enterprises. 

Network mapping is an ideal way to visualize all the devices on a network, determine how they are connected, and present the structure of the entire network. Network mapping can often provide information about whether the network is functioning properly or whether there are problems with any particular device.

Huawei iMaster Network Digital Map

This is where Huawei iMaster Network Digital Map comes in. Unlike conventional static network topology, this is a real-time, dynamic, and high-definition (HD) network map. On the basis of Huawei's autonomous driving network management and control system —Huawei iMaster NCE — the network digital map uses a host of key technologies such as a big data computing engine, AI, search algorithms, route simulation, and verification algorithms to provide abundant capabilities, such as multi-dimensional network visibility, path navigation, search and positioning, deterministic application experience assurance, real-time visibility into network quality, rapid fault demarcation and locating, and self-healing. 

These features help customers to switch the network O&M mode from static topology-based O&M to dynamic and HD digital map-based O&M. In this new mode, the network digital map intuitively displays network status in real time, maximizing network O&M efficiency.
Consultants Frost & Sullivan recognized the innovation capabilities of the Huawei iMaster NCE Network Digital Map technology, awarding the solution its 2023 "Global Technology Leadership Award" for its leading technical features and global excellence.

Further reading:

• iMaster NCE Autonomous Network Management and Control System [success stories, products, uses cases & more]

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Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.