Breaking Silos in Telecom: A Unified Solution for Real-Time Monitoring & Inventory Visibility

One of the leading telecommunication companies in the US and operating in multiple other countries. Our client also plays a key role in promoting mobile technology advancements and digital inclusion. This major wireless carrier has disrupted the industry with innovative plans and customer-centric initiatives. They’ve gained popularity for their competitive pricing, extensive 5G coverage, and focus on customer satisfaction.

Our customer is leveraging disparate legacy systems for monitoring and managing data centre resources which often fails to provide a comprehensive, real-time view of the infrastructure. Their partners were sunsetting some monitoring solutions, This made a stronger case for them to consider developing a unified inventory and monitoring solution from scratch to allow a more holistic and efficient management approach across their entire network infrastructure.

In the telecom industry, managing infrastructure and network services across a vast, complex environment presents unique challenges. Disparate monitoring and inventory solutions like Prometheus and Grafana are commonly used for monitoring, but they may pose several challenges, especially when used in isolation or without integration into a unified system. Some key challenges include:

• Lack of Centralized Asset Inventory Management: Telecom operators will experience difficulties in tracking the status, location, and condition of network assets, leading to inefficiencies in asset allocation, maintenance, and provisioning.
• Reduced Efficiency & Collaboration: Siloed Teams, Increased MTTR,
• Complex Integration: siloed monitoring tools that don’t communicate effectively, creating a fragmented monitoring ecosystem that is difficult to manage and scale
• Scalability Issues: Without proper scaling, the monitoring tools might struggle to handle high traffic loads, leading to delayed alerts, data loss, or incomplete metrics, particularly in real-time monitoring.
• Limited Context or Correlation: Difficulty in root cause analysis, challenging to understand the interdependencies between network elements, applications, and services.

It’s empirical to understand current challenges, gather stakeholder requirements, evaluate existing systems, and explore technology options. InOpTra performed a two-month discovery study to evaluate the current inventory management technologies and monitoring practices, identified gaps, and designed a comprehensive solution that could improve operational efficiency, asset tracking, and real-time monitoring of systems.

Some of the key deliverables through this exercise:

• Discovery Report: Summarizing the current state, challenges, interviewing key stakeholders.
• Solution Design Document: High-level architecture and features of the proposed solution. Technology recommendation to develop this solution.
• Prototype Demo: A proof of concept demonstrating key features of the monitoring and inventory system. Serves as a proof of concept that brings together monitoring and inventory management into a unified solution. By demonstrating key features such as asset tracking, real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and alerting, the demo will provide a tangible vision of how the proposed system can optimize operations and improve infrastructure management.
• Roadmap & Implementation Plan: Detailed steps for scaling the solution and integrating it into the existing infrastructure.Go-Live: Full deployment of the solution with all users trained and fully operational.
• Cost-Benefit Analysis: Financial analysis comparing the costs and benefits of implementing the proposed solution.

Technologies used to implement solution –

Promethus, Grafana, Mimir, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NetBox, Python, Redfish, Django, REST API’s

The solution brings the following benefits as a result:

• Improved Visibility: A unified dashboard providing centralized monitoring for all Redfish-enabled server hardware will ensure better oversight of the infrastructure.
• Enhanced Reporting: The solution will provide detailed reports on Historical data, time-series visualisation, filtering, tagging and sorting features and security compliance reports the risk of vulnerabilities and ensuring regulatory adherence.
• Seamless Integration: Integration with ServiceNow and other support tools will streamline incident management, reducing downtime and improving response times.
• Cost Savings: Avoid the need to use multiple solutions to manage the server infrastructure and the need to purchase additional SaaS licenses, saving significant capital and Operational expenses.

InOpTra’s unified inventory and monitoring solution has transformed the way our client manages their telecom infrastructure, addressing critical challenges like disparate systems, scalability issues, and limited visibility. By leveraging advanced technologies and a robust implementation plan, the solution not only enhanced operational efficiency but also streamlined asset management and monitoring processes. The successful integration with tools like ServiceNow and the adoption of innovative features like real-time tracking and predictive maintenance have ensured tangible improvements in performance and cost savings. This case underscores the potential of tailored solutions in driving impactful change across complex network environments.