The Evolution of Assurance for NFVThe Evolution of Assurance for NFV

Arguably there are three key capabilities that operators are looking for from NFV service assurance solutions: 1) virtualized active probes for service testing; 2) virtualized passive probes for service monitoring; and 3) a near-real-time, big data collection and analytics engine. This latter aggregates probe data and analyzes it for troubleshooting and performance management and helps determine corrective actions (self-healing) such as scaling or migrating VNFs. For all this to work, NFV service assurance must be integrated with the service orchestrator responsible for managing the VNF lifecycle. Service assurance analytics is a key input to the orchestrator, driving remedial changes to services/VNFs.