Zero touch network & Service Management (ZSM)

Zero touch network & Service Management (ZSM) is a next-gen network management approach using closed-loop principles hosted by ETSI. An ETSI blog has just demonstrated the first ZSM Proof of Concept (PoC). The slide deck describing the PoC, supplied by EnterpriseWeb, can be found here.

The diagram below shows a conceptual closed-loop assurance architecture used within the PoC
ETSI ZSM PoC.

It contains some similar concepts to a closed-loop traffic engineering project designed by PAOSS back in 2007, but with one big difference. That 2007 project was based on a single-vendor solution, as opposed to the open, multi-vendor PoC demonstrated here. Both were based on the principle of using assurance monitors to trigger fulfillment responses. For example, ours used SLA threshold breaches on voice switches to trigger automated remedial response through the OSS’s provisioning engine.

For this newer example, ETSI’s blog details, “The PoC story relates to a congestion event caused by a DDoS (Denial of Service) attack that results in a decrease in the voice quality of a network service. The fault is detected by service monitoring within one or more domains and is shared with the end-to-end service orchestrator which correlates the alarms to interpret the events, based on metadata and metrics, and classifies the SLA violations. The end-to-end service orchestrator makes policy-based decisions which trigger commands back to the domain(s) for remediation.”

You’ll notice one of the key call-outs in the diagram above is real-time inventory. That was much harder for us to achieve back in 2007 than it is now with virtualised network and compute layers providing real-time telemetry. We used inventory that was only auto-discovered once daily and had to build in error handling, whilst relying on over-provisioned physical infrastructure.

It’s exciting to see these types of projects being taken forward by ETSI, EnterpriseWeb, et al.

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