BT Ireland Reduced Alarm Noise with DX NetOps: Here’s How

For today’s enterprises, there’s no good time for network downtime. In this post, we detail how DX NetOps by Broadcom provides advanced capabilities that help teams minimize outage incidents and duration. We then offer an example of how these capabilities benefited a leading telecommunications provider in the UK, fueling an 80% reduction in alarm noise and a 40% decrease in mean time to resolution. 

The high cost of outages—and the difficulty of keeping them from happening

With the increasingly distributed and mobile nature of modern digital life, enterprises grow ever more reliant upon their network connections. Consequently, downtime continues to grow more costly. For example, one report indicated that, in 44% of organizations, hourly costs of outages range from $1 million to more than $5 million, and that’s not even accounting for any legal fees, fines, or penalties that may arise.

Given these steep costs, network operations teams are under increased pressure to minimize outage duration and occurrence. The problem is that while these efforts keep getting more critical, they also keep getting more difficult. Network environments continue to grow more complex, dynamic, and interdependent. While these environments keep generating more event data and alarms, teams struggle with visibility gaps and labor-intensive root cause analysis and remediation efforts.

As teams seek to manage service levels and uptime, they’re being stymied by overwhelming volumes of alarms. When teams are buried by extraneous, inaccurate, and overlapping alarms, it…

• Saps productivity and morale.
• Takes time away from more strategic endeavors.
• Elongates resolution efforts, leading to more and longer outages.

How DX NetOps helps

DX NetOps is a scalable, multi-tenant solution that delivers advanced capabilities in such areas as network analytics, operator dashboards, data correlation, and third-party integration. DX NetOps offers advanced capabilities that reduce alarm noise, featuring unified visibility, optimized triage workflows, and advanced analytics.

The solution delivers these advantages:

• Speed resolution time. DX NetOps offers the intelligence to weed out the noise of extraneous, overlapping alarms, and ensure operators receive targeted, timely intelligence. The solution helps teams ensure they are focusing on the right issue and can find the culprit and fix it quickly.
• Reduce mean time to innocence. With DX NetOps, teams can intuitively and quickly identify the domain in which an issue is originating. If an issue arises in an internally managed domain, teams can rapidly identify where, and take steps to investigate and remediate. If the issue arises in an externally managed environment, teams can quickly demonstrate that their internal network is not the cause, and they can hold service providers accountable and help devise workarounds.
• Boost standardization of workflows. DX NetOps delivers a unified, cohesive view of all the environments that end user services rely upon, including those internally managed and those managed by third parties. The solution supports the establishment of consistent, standard, best-practice-based workflows—regardless of where issues may arise. As a result, less experienced level-one operators can resolve more issues without having to escalate to senior engineers. This enables teams to mitigate the skills gap that plagues many organizations.

DX NetOps: Key capabilities

Unified visibility

With DX NetOps, teams can establish unified views of their internal environment, whether they’re running traditional, on-premises networks, SD-WAN, or any other mix of technologies. With AppNeta by Broadcom, they can also extend this unified visibility to encompass environments managed by third parties, including cloud providers, ISPs, and more. The solution provides one portal for all network intelligence, including fault, performance, and flow. This enables faster, more effective analysis and response.

Standard operating procedures

With its advanced capabilities and comprehensive coverage, DX NetOps enables teams to establish standardized processes for alerting, investigation, and remediation. These standard operating procedures can be applied across:

• Any network type, whether modern SD-WAN or traditional.
• Any vendor technology. (Visit our Device Certification Portal to see a complete list of vendors and technologies supported.)
• Any network segment, including Wi-Fi, LAN, WAN, cloud, or SaaS.

With the solution, teams can establish intelligent, optimized triage workflows that maximize team speed and productivity.

Advance analytics

DX NetOps delivers advanced analytics capabilities that optimize the delivery of accurate, actionable insights:

• Fault suppression. The solution does proactive polling of component status and generates events based on threshold violations. The solution does this while analyzing fault domains, which are collections of alarms that are affected by the same failure.
• Topology based fault isolation. DX NetOps can automatically map topological relationships through its efficient, automated discovery engine. Further, it keeps these maps current based on direct communication with devices. The solution can then support physical and logical topology analysis, enabling fast identification of where within the topology that an issue is arising. The solution helps pinpoint the infrastructure domains and devices that are responsible for issues, and enables fast drill-down for diagnosis.
• Policy-based condition correlation. It is important to have holistic visibility to spot problems early and to distinguish between differing levels of severity. For example, as opposed to just getting an alert that an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system switched to battery power, the fact that multiple such systems have done so may indicate that there’s a widespread power outage. Similarly, one or two authentication failures may happen routinely, but if suddenly hundreds of failures occur, it could mean some type of cyber attack or security breach has occurred. DX NetOps offers a comprehensive set of capabilities for correlation, enabling teams to gain the critical context to guide prioritization and follow up.
• Metric projections. DX NetOps can calculate future values based on historical metric data captured. Teams can understand trends around usage and better forecast upcoming capacity requirements. This enables more informed, proactive capacity planning and helps teams preempt potential capacity-related issues.  
• Traffic analysis and anomaly detection. The solution helps teams rapidly spot problems like bottlenecks and congestion. It delivers the critical visibility teams need to understand which apps are being used, where bottlenecks are occurring, which processes are consuming bandwidth on a particular interface, and so on. Teams can employ forecasts to spot emerging issues and address them before they have an impact on users.

How noise reduction helped BT Ireland

Company

BT Ireland is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the UK, serving 75 of the 100 companies in the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index. Responsible for approximately 5,400 patents, the company has approximately 100,000 employees around the world.

Requirement

To support its global users and deliver its leading services to customers, BT Ireland is highly reliant upon its network connections. It was essential that the network operations team prevent issues and optimize service levels. To keep pace with their dynamic, large, and complex environments, the team needed to improve efficiency and reduce false alarms, which were prolonging troubleshooting times.

Solution

To improve the management of their network operations, the team turned to DX NetOps and they worked with Data Edge, network optimization specialists based in Ireland. The Data Edge team helped support the design and implementation of the solution.

Benefits

By implementing DX NetOps, the network operations team at BT Ireland was able to realize these benefits:

• Reduced alarm volume by 80%.
• Shortened mean time to resolution by 40%.
• Improved service levels for BT customers and users.
• Enhanced network operations efficiency.

Conclusion

When it comes to today’s networks, downtime truly is money. With DX NetOps, teams can minimize the incidence and duration of network issues. The solution enables teams to reduce alarm noise, leverage timely intelligence, and more quickly and effectively spot and address issues. To learn more, be sure to view our Small Bytes webcast, Learn how BT achieved so much alarm noise reduction in their NOC. You can also download our in-depth white paper, Rapid and Accurate Isolation of Issues in Modern Networks.