Edenor and the Implementation of VIAVI OBSERVER ONE® Monitoring System

A Success Story

"Observer is a leading product that has provided the fastest payback of all the monitoring solutions we have used. It enabled our IT team to determine the causes of multiple problems that arise day to day. It allows us to trace and narrow them down to any link in the network, server, application, or service. Furthermore, it has enabled us to build solid dashboards and metrics over the long term, on which we can optimize the network and its HW and SW resources" Julio Bragulat NOC

Challenges

There is never a dull moment for Edenor's network engineering team. Every day brings tasks and challenges to face, some planned...others not as much.

Edenor is an electricity distribution company with operations in one of the most densely populated areas in the Americas. The northern and western portions of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Its concession area is 4,637 km2, with a population of 9 million people, of which 3.2 million are customers. Edenor’s IT engineering team has operational responsibility for the entire network, servers, and applications on which all of this company’s services depend

Edenor has currently consolidated the aforementioned infrastructure set (data on datacenter internet services.

2.0 networks 1G 10G that were being implemented, smartgrid meters, etc.)

These initiatives have reduced operating costs (tariff metrics, customer service, internal management, etc.). But the fact of having added this significant complexity and new technologies has also brought added complexity to the contingencies that IT traditionally experienced in the daily O&M work of IT infrastructure. The current environment consists of highly distributed applications across servers, dispersed and interconnected by its own transport network, with major Datacenter nodes and network nodes.

This implies that troubleshooting service and application performance outages is difficult and requires many indirect checks and activities, which require personnel distributed throughout the geography covered by the network.

The major problem that this situation entails is an increasingly greater difficulty in discerning whether a problem is in the network, the servers, the client, or the applications.

Indeed, the problem that presents itself is being able to quickly locate where the root cause resides, whether it is an application or a performance degradation in a link, and at a given OSI layer (e.g., at layer 2, 3, session, services).

Solution

Over the past few months, Edenor has quickly overcome the challenges of narrowing down failures and raising the overall operational performance of the infrastructure. The disruptive moment was precisely when starting a POC (Proof of Concept) of a VIAVI Observer One monitoring system with Tecnous. Initially the provider integrated the platform, which included the development of Dashboards specific to collecting and analyzing metrics from networks, resources, and services such as VoIP. From there the engineers were able to begin a generalized Survey of multiple operational conditions at network and application levels.

As Julio said, ‹‹ “Observer is a leading product that has provided the fastest payback of all the monitoring solutions we have used. It enabled our IT team to determine the causes of multiple problems that arise day to day. It allows us to trace and narrow them down to any link in the network, server, application, or service. Furthermore, it has enabled us to build solid dashboards and metrics over the long term, on which we can optimize the network and its HW and SW resources” ››

Critical Applications

Edenor uses various third-party and some proprietary applications. In particular, its technical and commercial operation depends on 2 critical applications that are used across different areas of the company. These applications presented problems of such magnitude that the situation was on the verge of generating a legal conflict with their providers. These providers claimed that the problems were due to the data network and not to application performance. Edenor's network team used Wireshark and mobilized to offices where problems were reported to perform captures and attempt to diagnose them. This approach did not allow errors to be captured at the moment of their occurrence and required resources and time that did not produce conclusive results.

The Observer One® solution from VIAVI enabled real-time capture and storage of all information from different offices; diagnose and show clearly where the aforementioned problems were located.

User Experience

The resolution of problems in critical applications allowed Edenor to move beyond these pressing day-to-day difficulties. Using VIAVI's "End User Experience" (EUE) metric, the network team was able to anticipate problems before they were reported and support tickets opened. The EUE indicator is a metric developed by VIAVI that, through hundreds of network KPIs and the use of Machine Learning algorithms, enables quick visualization of degradations experienced by users. This indicator allows you to see at a glance where and in what domain problems are occurring.

VoIP and Contact Centers

With approximately 3.2 million customers, contact centers are a key area for the company. Edenor has its own infrastructure, which uses VoIP communications to route all calls. Monitoring and ensuring the quality of calls was another area that improved with the incorporation of VIAVI's ObserverOne® tool. Creating Dashboards and metrics broken down by sites enabled precise identification of which offices experienced call degradation and identification of problems in a timely manner.

Its ability to isolate the problem across client, server, network, and application domains made it possible to properly define and correct errors and problems, assigning each responsible group the tasks for their resolution.

Future Development

Edenor is considering the deployment of the Gigaflow® application from Observer One®, involving the network security team. This application will increase monitoring capacity for security operations and add forensic analysis and incident remediation capabilities. Once this deployment is complete, ObserverOne® will be fully operational with all its capabilities deployed.

…Contact Tecnous

We invite you to contact us so we can provide you with information about this and other VIAVI solutions for IP network performance issues. We have "DEMO" systems available that we can deploy for measurement in your networks, providing you the opportunity to compare and quantify the results and benefits of this network monitoring and analysis technique.

Southern Cone

(+5411) 5368-4400

info@tecnous.com

Av. Caseros 824 (C1152AAR), Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Central America, Caribbean, and US

+ 1 (305) 529-3667