Application Flow Management and Service Assurance
As Service Providers push to provide a larger share of the user experience (become Experience Providers) and Enterprise IT needs to rapidly deliver new business applications to distributed organizations, meeting SLA requirements increasingly depends on understanding whether network behavior is meeting end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) goals. This drives the need to detect, monitor and control individual application flows as they traverse the network.Technical enablers that have become available include: flexible netflow, deep packet inspection, granular QoS, compression, and protocol optimization.
A comprehensive application flow management and service assurance system might infer (and improve) end-user QoE by collecting and correlating information from: Network monitoring agents that collect low-level resource and basic service data; Application-flow monitoring agents; and End-system QoE monitoring agents. Among the challenges are the need to correlate application flows with network resource performance (including monitoring service path data over time), identifying the application flows contributing to a given customer experience (in a wide range of contexts, including mobility and inter-application dependencies), and dealing effectively with the explosion of performance data from different sources and of widely varying granularities.
We would like to explore whether such a system is feasible, scalable, and results in meaningful improvement in end-user Quality of Experience, and operations simplicity/effectiveness.
