QUEBEC CITY — EXFO, the communications industry’s test, monitoring and analytics experts, today announced a groundbreaking solution, in collaboration with Intel, enabling 5G network operators to identify and correlate service degradation issues. This solution supports automation for cloud specific assurance regardless of whether faults originate in the network, service layers, or in the cloud-native network infrastructure.

According to the latest joint research findings from Heavy Reading and EXFO1, 81% of operators surveyed expect 5G networks will be more difficult to troubleshoot than 4G networks. Similarly, 69% of operators agreed that fault detection and correlation are more difficult in cloud-native networks, with 74% of them citing a lack of sufficient cloud-specific assurance tools forcing them to rely on manual processes.

EXFO’s full-stack assurance solution utilizes platform observability by Intel alongside EXFO’s existing adaptive service assurance (ASA) platform to close the visibility gap among cloud-native infrastructure and the network and service layers. In doing so, it provides complete visibility across the entire operational span of operator networks. The solution enables operators to assess the operational state of the underpinning cloud-native infrastructure from the chip-level up, allowing faults to be isolated or correlated across all network domains. Together, the EXFO and Intel technology speeds up the time to resolution and eliminates domain-specific fault denial.

Intel® Xeon Scalable Processors, with built-in AI and NFV accelerators, provide the foundation to propel 5G experiences and Intel® Platform Telemetry Insights provide a granular view into the cloud-native infrastructure operations. It enables operators to “see” right into the heart of the foundational platform infrastructure and assess operational metrics, including health, utilization, congestion, power consumption and configuration checks. By adopting CNCF’s OpenTelemetry project, Intel provides a standard implementation for the industry to benefit from infrastructure observability.

“Network virtualization is an evolutionary path that began in 4G and is now firmly established in 5G. But managing service level agreements across virtual and physical domains is significantly more challenging, especially when the infrastructure is not always owned by the operator. As part of our adaptive service assurance platform, EXFO’s full-stack assurance solution ensures that operators can detect, correlate and resolve faults wherever they originate, significantly reducing time to resolution,” said Philippe Morin, EXFO’s CEO.

“While service assurance in mobile networks is relatively well understood, the added dimension of cloud-native infrastructure provides a new challenge for most operators. Given the ubiquitous adoption of solutions fueled by Intel Xeon processors in the core network, Intel Platform Telemetry Insights with Open Telemetry and EXFO’s ASA platform provides the lens operators need to help deliver full service assurance across their network infrastructure,” said Alex Quach, VP and GM, Intel’s Wireline & Core Network Division.

EXFO’s full-stack assurance solution is governed by EXFO’s adaptive service assurance technology, which detects customer-impacting events originating from communications network infrastructure and services, plus delivers full visibility across network layers 1-7. The solution orchestrates the real-time interworking of several performance data feeds, and dynamically collects and analyzes the right mix of system, monitoring, and telemetry data to perform real-time network monitoring and inform effective action. Through integration of the Intel Platform Telemetry Insights data stream, customers of EXFO’s data source-agnostic adaptive service assurance platform have instant access to essential infrastructure performance metrics.

EXFO’s full-stack assurance solution is now available for customer deployment.