Sprint uses CA Performance Management to monitor over 50,000 network devices and 2 million interfaces across its 40,000 physical locations. It groups interfaces and devices by site and function to create dashboards and scorecards for network planning, operations, and engineering teams. Key dashboards include interface and group views using tables and trend graphs. Scorecards provide a summary view of metric projections and utilization for interface bundles across the network. The flexible grouping allows limitless reporting combinations to meet various user needs.

1. Case Study: Sprint Monitors Its Mega-Network for
Voice/Video/Data Service Assurance with CA
Performance Management
Mike Peterson
Sprint
Wireless Core Planner
Session Number

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Case Study: Sprint Monitors Its Mega-Network for
Voice/Video/Data Service Assurance with CA
Performance Management
3
11/19/2015

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Agenda
• General Business Case
• Size and Scope of Environment
• Groups
• Dashboards
• Scorecards
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General Business Case
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General Business Case
Network Planning and Performance
• Scale the network to exceed customer demand in the most cost effective manner possible.
• Ensure the network operates at peak performance.
Challenges
• Report and forecast utilization on over 400,000 interfaces.
• Monitor and alarm on device components and interfaces for anomalous behavior.
• Provide clear and concise reporting.
• Respond to ad hoc reporting requests quickly.
• Develop ‘flow based’ reporting and use Top N reporting sparingly.
• Keep up with evolving devices, designs and scale.
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Size and Scope of Environment
7

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Size and Scope of Environment
Components
• Over 40,000 physical locations.
• More than 50,000 devices and 2 million interfaces.
• A wide array of networking devices and manufacturers.
• Wireless Core accounts for 6% of the devices and interfaces.
Data Points
• 2.2 million components polled every polling cycle, 288 cycles per day.
• 4.4 trillion data points:
• 91% of the 4.4 trillion is a combination of five minute polled and calculated metrics retained for 45 days.
• The remainder is hourly and daily roll-ups.
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Size and Scope of Environment
Calculations and Notifications
• Three metric projections on Bits In and Bits Out.
• Baselines and standard deviations for utilization and component performance.
• Threshold notifications sent to email recipients and external monitoring systems.
Users
• Application is available to all employees.
• Operations:
• Viewing performance in near real time
• Analyzing historical performance for RCA (Root Cause Analysis)
• Engineering:
• Capacity planning utilizing trending
• Performance metric trending
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Groups
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Groups
Challenges
• We have too many interfaces for a user to be able to effectively build reports by searching.
• We wanted to put most of our interfaces into at least one group.
• We needed to be able to group similar interfaces across 30+ sites.
• There are users that have no working knowledge of the Wireless Core.
• Downstream customers need groups that fit their view of the network.
• Management has stated a preference for contextual reporting, minimizing Top N.
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Groups
Observations / Experience
• The true power of the platform is in groups.
• The flexibility of groups is a powerful feature, enabling limitless reporting combinations.
• We based our primary group organization around our sites. Each site has many interface
groupings; the group structure is common across sites.
• Our groups use rules instead of manually selecting members.
• Rules can be very simple, containing only other groups.
• They can also be very complex and powerful by leveraging regular expressions.
• Outside of the site structure we can easily build other group containers by using references.
Because we are using text/pattern matching on interface descriptions, established interface naming
and description conventions must be strictly followed.
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Groups
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• A site’s interface types or functions are identified and grouped.

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Groups | By Site
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• Each of the groups within the
site are grouped together as a
site group.

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Groups | By Interface Groupings
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• Individual interface groupings
are tied together across all of
the sites.

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Groups | By Platform
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• Devices are grouped similar to
interfaces.

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Groups | Example
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• Sites are the primary groups
containing the various
interface functional types.
• Interface groups contain
reference groups from the
sites.
• Within the sites, top level
groups will contain all
associated interfaces.
Subordinate level (aggregate)
groups contain just the
LAG/Bundle.

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Dashboards
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Dashboards
• We rely heavily on dashboards for our capacity planning activities.
• The dashboard views we favor the most are IM Table (Top) and IM Custom View Group Scorecard.
• The default Dashboards are excellent, especially Router, Interface and Group.
• 50% of our published dashboards are locked to a specific group.
• Trend graphs and tabular views offer unique but equally valuable insights.
• Users are allowed to edit any dashboard and save changes to only their account. They can also
build their own without cluttering the Performance Manager menus.
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Dashboards
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Dashboards
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• IM Table (Top) – Used both by Operations and Planning
• Useful for data extractions (csv)

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Dashboards
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Scorecards
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Scorecards
• Scorecards have proven to be the most useful dashboard view.
• To fully realize their potential, a lot of time and care needs to be spent on group administration.
Group hierarchy is key.
• Two types of scorecards are used:
• Dynamic Context – Any group can be viewed;
• Locked Context – Specific groups are chosen and locked to the dashboard. We use these for high profile
interfaces.
• Scorecard strengths:
• The ability to view at a summary level many interfaces at once;
• The ability to drill deeper into the data;
• Metric projections;
• Identifying out-of-balance interface members in LAGs/Bundles.
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Scorecards
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Scorecards
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