Myth-Busting Assurance: Device-Centric vs. Service-Centric and Why Both Are Key

Today, many systems look at assurance purely on a device level, using port stats, device health, syslogs, and other infrastructure or device-based telemetry data. It’s useful to understand and get insight from a device perspective, but this insight is reactive.

Likewise, the primary way to discover that a customer or end user is impacted by network performance issues in this scenario is still through trouble tickets. However, if a customer has already taken the time to call or create a trouble ticket, that also puts IT support in a reactive mode—chasing the problem.

In this blog, we’ll compare a few common ways of managing your network performance and reliability. You’ll learn about the capabilities of different assurance approaches to deliver a view into your customer or end user’s network experience and discover how taking a more proactive, customer-centric approach will help you get ahead of issues.

Device-level assurance is useful—but it’s not enough

Device-level assurance is very good at detecting hard faults and delivering insights that are typically red or green—red meaning the device is not performing as expected and green indicating everything is fine. Gradual degradation is harder to pick up, yet from the customer or end-user perspective, any degradation slows down the network.

For example, recent network analysis performed by one of our service provider customers revealed that even a 0.53 percent packet loss can mean a 50 percent decrease in data or throughput. A five-millisecond delay can cause a 10 percent decrease in throughput. Device-level insights are ineffective at detecting quality of experience (QoE) problems and don’t reveal the impact an issue may have on the customer. Red at the device level does not always mean customer experience is impacted, and green does not always mean everything is good.

Service-level assurance delivers a proactive, customer-centric view

Shifting focus to the service can provide a view of how the customer is experiencing the network and the impact of any performance delays. This allows you to take a proactive approach by continuously monitoring the end-to-end service experience.

Granular measurements of KPIs, such as sub-1 percent packet loss detection and other one-way metrics, can provide fine-grained insights into what customers are experiencing. Small amounts of loss can greatly impact time or latency-sensitive services, and a customer’s perception of slowness is measured in milliseconds.

Metadata is also a key component of service assurance. Metadata could include a customer’s site, region, class of service, geographic coordinates, topology, or other details that add context to performance data and KPIs. This enriches insights and helps you understand the relationship of performance patterns. For instance, if you can see that all customers with a latency issue are going through the same router, understanding that relationship can help you isolate the possible root cause.

Using machine learning algorithms and analytics will further allow you to correlate relevant data and pinpoint the issue. You can even get a glimpse into the future and start to predict performance by baselining what is normal, detecting deviations, and taking preemptive action to prevent customer-impacting issues.

Bringing it all together with a unified view of digital experience

Correlating a single view of device-level and service-centric assurance can save time and costs while helping you continuously improve the end user’s digital experience. In fact, 75 percent of IT leaders plan to enable single-console end-to-end visibility across network domains, according to the Cisco 2024 Global Networking Trends Report. Organizations that do so will empower more proactive and customer-centric network operations with the ability to see, detect, and even predict customer-impacting issues instead of reactively responding to problems only when end users call and open trouble tickets.

An end-to-end view of service performance allows you to focus on the customer-impacting issues that should be prioritized. Bringing together device and service-centric assurance gives you a clearer understanding of what the real issue is—and where it’s happening within your network.

With Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance (formerly Accedian Skylight), organizations gain microsecond-level visibility and service-centric insights essential for critical enterprise connectivity and managing large-scale, complex provider networks—the “owned” aspect of the global area network.

The result? Simplified operations and seamless digital experiences across carrier-grade environments.

Get more insights on forward-thinking approaches to assurance in our research paper: 

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