Active Assurance Overview

Active Assurance uses synthetic traffic to continuously monitor your network, helping you understand service quality and identify, troubleshoot, and resolve issues before customers are affected.

Traditional service assurance collects only telemetry data from devices in the infrastructure. While this is useful, telemetry does not reflect the actual end-user experience. Furthermore, traditional assurance solutions do not assess the customer experience over the lifetime of the service. Active Assurance resolves these limitations by actively generating traffic across network, allowing automated testing processes and end-to-end service quality verifications to proactively enhance the customer experience.

The following are the key components of Active Assurance:

• Control Center—Routing Director acts as the control center of Active Assurance. It is the central management system that manages Test Agents deployed in your network, run measurements, and collects and stores the generated measurement results. After you install Routing Director in your premises, you can log in to the Routing Director GUI to manage Test Agents in your network. For more information on installation instructions, see Routing Director Installation Guide.

• Test Agent—Software components installed on physical or virtual infrastructure, including network devices or cloud-based virtual machine, which acts as a measurement point in your network. These Test Agents are deployed at strategic locations in your network to evaluate the quality of your network by collecting metric data for preconfigured key performance indicators (KPIs). Test Agents generate, receive, and analyze network traffic, and therefore enable you to continuously view and monitor both real-time and aggregated result metrics.
• Plug-ins—Software extension that enables Test Agents to run Measurements. Plug-ins are packaged as .nap files, which contain necessary Plug-in executables and dependencies. Each Plug-in supports a specific type of task such as DNS, HTTP, TWAMP, IPTV, RPM, and so on. When a Measurement starts, Test Agents downloads the packages of Plug-ins that you have specified and use these Plug-ins to run Measurements. Measurements then report the metrics in the form of streams, which you can view in the Routing Director GUI.. The Test Agent downloads the plug-in that are executable from Routing Director.

• Measurements—Measurements are the fundamental unit of configuration in the Active Assurance use-case that defines how network traffic is generated and evaluated. It represents the process of evaluating a network path between a Test Agent interface and an endpoint, and specifies the behavior of a Test Agent by defining which plug-in to run, what parameters to use, and what traffic to generate.

You can access the Routing Director GUI to view the Test Agents deployed across your network, create and run on-demand verification tests, and view real-time and aggregated results, and analyze performance data to troubleshoot issues.