Performance Management is a key function of the O-RAN Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) framework. The O-RAN SMO provides a set of performance management functions that enable network operators to monitor, measure, and optimize the performance of their O-RAN networks.

The O-RAN SMO provides a rich set of performance metrics that cover various aspects of the network, including radio access, transport, and core network performance. These metrics are collected in real-time from different network elements and can be used for real-time monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting. 

We recently developed a new SMO Performance Dashboard and integrated it with AMCOP, learn more in my previous blog post. 

The O-RAN SMO also provides advanced analytics capabilities that enable network operators to detect and predict performance issues before they occur. This helps operators to proactively address performance issues, minimize network downtime, and improve overall network quality.

In addition to real-time monitoring and analytics, the O-RAN SMO also provides historical performance analysis capabilities. This enables network operators to analyze performance trends over time, identify areas for improvement, and optimize network performance over the long term.

Overall, the O-RAN SMO's performance management capabilities are critical for ensuring the reliability, availability, and quality of O-RAN networks. By providing real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and historical analysis, the O-RAN SMO enables operators to optimize network performance, reduce downtime, and improve customer satisfaction.

Aarna.ml offers the number one open source and vendor neutral O-RAN SMO as part of Aarna.ml Multi Cluster Orchestration Platform (AMCOP). Learn more about O-RAN SMO and contact us for a free consultation. 

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Aarna.ml is growing fast and we are thrilled to introduce and welcome eight new, exceptionally talented staffers to the Aarna family. Each individual brings their unique skills, experiences, and enthusiasm to our dynamic team, propelling us further on our mission to help enterprises and network operators unlock previously unimagined new services, drastically slash operational costs, and improve time to market. Let's take a closer look at the remarkable individuals who have joined us:

1. Subash Saravanan: Crafting Excellence in Automation and Infrastructure

With a diverse skill set encompassing Python programming, networking (CCNA), shell scripting, RDBMS, and Ansible, Subash Saravanan is a valuable addition to our team. His ability to handle automation, containerization, and infrastructure management with ease enhances our capabilities to deliver innovative solutions. Subash holds a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from Govt College of Engineering, Bargur, Krishnagiri.

2. Sowmiya Jayakumar: Mastering Java and Problem Solving

Sowmiya's passion for Java programming and problem-solving makes her a perfect fit for our team. Her expertise extends to software tools like Git, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and Visual Studio Code. With proficiency in Java, Python, and Groovy Script, Sowmiya brings a fresh perspective to our projects. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University College of Engineering, Arni.

3. Thilagawathi Sambath: Navigating Networking and Python with Precision

Thilagawathi brings a solid understanding of networking and proficiency in Python and Core Java to our AES project. His knowledge and expertise are integral to our ongoing innovations. Thilagawathi graduated from the University College of Engineering in Arni-Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, with a degree in electronics and communication engineering.

4. Priyanka Shalini Jayaprakash: Adept Developer with a Technological Flair

Priyanka is a talented software developer with proficiency in Python, Java fundamentals, and networking. Her dedication to her craft is evident through her accomplishments, including a bachelor's degree in ECE from the University College of Engineering in Arni. Her skills will undoubtedly contribute to the success of our projects.

5. Durga Devi Selvaraj: Navigating Engineering with Expertise

Durga is a graduate of the University College of Engineering Arani with a degree in Electronic and Communication Engineering. Her proficiency in networking fundamentals, Java, Groovy scripts, and Python enhances our capabilities and furthers our commitment to excellence.

6. Tamilselvan Mani: Bridging Networking and Programming Proficiency

Tamilselvan brings a comprehensive skill set to our team, including networking basics, Python, Linux, Shell scripting, and more. With a background in Electronics and Communication Engineering from University College of Engineering Arni, his expertise contributes to our collective excellence.

7. Mohan Raj Dhandapani: Solving Challenges with Technical Proficiency

Mohan’s proficiency in Python, Shell scripts, Linux, and network basics is an asset to our team. His problem-solving abilities and knowledge of Flask framework add depth to our capabilities. Mohan holds a degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from University College of Engineering Arni.

8. Gurpreet Singh: Adding Marketing Acumen to Our Team

Gurpreet joins us with extensive experience in marketing, advertising, and sales, acquired during his tenure at Amazon. His strategic insights and brand engagement expertise contribute to our dynamic team. Gurpreet holds an alumnus status at the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad.

At Aarna.ml, our team is our greatest strength. With the addition of these talented individuals, we're excited to continue pushing boundaries, innovating, and delivering exceptional solutions. Welcome aboard! Together, we'll create a future defined by excellence and innovation.

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It’s been a little over a year since Nephio was first announced and the progress the community has made since that time has been inspiring. In my role on the Nephio TSC, I’ve had the chance to collaborate across the industry and build a community around this promising new approach to intent-based network orchestration.

Nephio is declarative and intent driven (an intent driven system monitors the current state and continuously reconciles it with the intended state) and presents a new approach to the industry for orchestration and management of network services, edge computing applications, and the underlying infrastructure. What's most exciting to me is using Nehio to overcome the following challenges for edge workload orchestration and management. 

• Scale: Edge deployments today are growing exponentially in size with tens of thousands of edge sites, tens of infra providers, with hundreds of workloads.
• Infrastructure Dependency: Workloads have specific requirements which means that infra needs to be orchestrated first to meet the requirements of the workloads. 
• Heterogeneity: Deployments today include a wide variety of edge clusters, storage, compute, K8s flavors,  HW, SW, Storage, services and application.  

Nephio takes on these challenges by using Kubernetes as a general purpose control plane. It constantly reconciles the current state with the intended state which is required for scaling large and complex networks. It is suitable for both infrastructure and workloads for on-demand infrastructure and clouds. And because it’s heterogeneous, it can handle both public and private clouds, multi-vendor environments, and third-party network functions and cloud native applications.

I’m also excited that Nephio uses the O2 interface (as defined in O-RAN architecture) as one of its stated use cases. In the recent LF Networking Developer & Testing Forum, I presented a session covering how O2 IMS (Infrastructure Management Service) can be achieved on Nephio architecture and how Nephio is influencing the evolution of radio networks with an O-RAN-O2 IMS K8s profile. With its simplicity and cloud native Kubernetes approach, I believe Nephio is a perfect fit for the management and orchestration of cloud native RAN workloads and I’m looking forward to further collaboration in this area. 

Lastly, I’m very proud of the way the community came together to achieve consensus on the scope, produce the release artifacts and documentation with many new features and capabilities, and deliver R1 for the industry.

If you’ve been on the sidelines with Nephio, I encourage you to get involved in the community by learning more on the Nephio wiki. Feel free to contact me as well about any questions or ideas for Nephio you may have and I’d be happy to reserve some time to discuss them.

Those in Bangalore, India are invited to a Nephio R1 Overview and Collaboration meetup on Thursday, September 28th. Learn more and register.

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O-RAN Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) is a component that addresses the orchestration, management, and automation aspects of O-RAN and is critical for supporting and managing disaggregated, multi-vendor RAN environments. Aarna.ml has developed the industry leading open source O-RAN SMO that is included in AMCOP.

Overview

A performance dashboard is a critical tool within the O-RAN SMO ecosystem that offers insights into the network's performance and key performance indicators (KPIs). The usability of a performance dashboard in O-RAN SMO can be quite beneficial for various stakeholders:

• Network operators: The performance dashboard offers historical and real-time statistics on network performance, enabling operators to keep an eye on the network's health, spot possible problems or bottlenecks, and take the necessary steps to improve user experience and optimize network performance.

• Service Assurance Teams: With the use of the dashboard, service assurance teams are able to monitor the quality of services provided via the O-RAN network, ensuring that service-level agreements (SLAs) are met and locating any service-related problems that require quick attention.

• Network Engineers: Network engineers may undertake in-depth analysis, diagnose issues, and fine-tune network configurations to increase overall network efficiency with the aid of performance data and visualizations on the dashboard.

• Capacity Planning: The dashboard aids in capacity planning for future network development and resource allocation by analyzing historical performance trends. That enables network operators to better anticipate and meet rising traffic demands.

• Decision Makers and Executives: The dashboard's high-level summary and KPIs make it simpler for executives and decision makers to comprehend the overall performance and health of the O-RAN network.

• Proactive Maintenance: The dashboard enables proactive maintenance with real-time data, enabling operators to identify anomalies early and address any problems before they have an impact on end users.

• Vendor Performance Evaluation: The dashboard can be used by operators who work with numerous suppliers to compare the performance of each vendor's machinery, assisting in vendor selection and guaranteeing contractual compliance.

The actual usability of a performance dashboard in O-RAN SMO will depend on its layout, user interface, the breadth of the performance indicators displayed, and the connection with other management and orchestration components. 

Getting Started

Aarna.ml AMCOP O-RAN SMO supports performance dashboard view in Grafana. There are two types of dashboards – one predefined and one user defined. The SMO will launch Grafana at deployment with some predefined dashboards added. In the new Performance App of SMO, these dashboards will be visible, but users cannot do anything from the UI. User defined dashboards can be added or deleted from the UI.

One can query, visualize, alert on, and analyze your metrics, logs, and traces using Grafana open source software, regardless of where they are kept. You can use the tools provided by Grafana OSS to create meaningful graphs and visualizations from the data in your time-series database (TSDB).

Grafana is accessible at http://<AMCOP_IP>:30080 and Prometheus is accessible at http://<AMCOP_IP>:30900/graph. Note: Please swap in the AMCOP_IP address to get the relevant results for your VM deployment.

Credentials to access the Grafana is: 

• username/password:-  admin/admin

To create a dashboard in Grafana, one has to follow the steps below:

• After selecting the dashboard option, there is a list of available dashboards. In the right-side corner there is the new button where one can choose the option. 

• To import an existing dashboard, one can choose any of  the following methods: 1. Import Dashboard from File, 2. Import Dashboard from Grafana.com, 3. Import via Panel json.

To add a new dashboard one needs to add the following data:

1. Add Visualization - Select a data source and then query and visualize your data with charts, statistics and tables or create lists, markdowns, and other widgets. 
2. Add row - Group your visualization into expandable sections.
3. Import Library Panel - Import visualizations that are shared with other dashboards.

After adding all the data, click on the Apply button on the right hand side to save the dashboard. 

To add matrices in Grafana, follow these steps:

Note: To send data, Users can use Aarna’s simulator to send PM data.

•  Run the simulator image (In this case we are using CU simulator)

• sudo docker run -d -p62300:830 -p61301:22 amcopnightly/amcop-cu-image:v0.1

• pick any one of the attached XML.gz files and copy it to the /tmp folder of the docker container that runs the simulator using below commands

• sudo docker ps | grep amcop-cu | awk '{print $1}'
• sudo docker cp A20230318.0115+0000-20230318.0120+0000_5_VCUDEVICE.xml.gz <container_id>:/tmp/
• sudo docker exec -it <container_id> bash -c "chown -R netconf:netconf /tmp/A20230318.0115+0000-20230318.0120+0000_5_VCUDEVICE.xml.gz"
• sudo docker exec -it <container_id> bash -c "ls -l /tmp"

• Follow the below steps to push a ves notification to get the file inside DFC

• Get ves collector IP

• kubectl get svc -n amcop-system | grep ves | awk '{print $3}'

• Modify the below  curl call to send ves notification

curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d '{

"event": {

"commonEventHeader": {

"version": "4.0.1",

"vesEventListenerVersion": "7.0.1",

"domain": "notification",

"eventName": "Noti_RnNode-Ericsson_FileReady",

"eventId": "FileReady_1797490e-10ae-4d48-9ea7-3d7d790b25e1",

"lastEpochMicrosec": 8745745764578,

"priority": "Normal",

"reportingEntityName": "otenb5309",

"sequence": 0,

"sourceName": "oteNB5309",

"startEpochMicrosec": 8745745764578,

"timeZoneOffset": "UTC+05.30"

},

"notificationFields": {

"changeIdentifier": "PM_MEAS_FILES",

"changeType": "FileReady",

"notificationFieldsVersion": "2.0",

"arrayOfNamedHashMap": [{

"name": "A20230318.0115+0000-20230318.0120+0000_5_VCUDEVICE.xml.gz“,

"hashMap": {

"location": 

"sftp://netconf:netconf@<vm_ip>:61301/tmp/A20230318.0115+0000-20230318.0120+0000_5_VCUDEVICE.xml.gz",

"compression": "gzip",

"fileFormatType": "org.3GPP.28.532#measData",

"fileFormatVersion": "V7"

}

}]

}

}

}

}' 'http://<ves_collector_ip>:8080/eventListener/v7'

Go to the Grafana dashboard and select the metrics from the dropdown and click apply. 

To get embedded URL from grafana dashboard, follow these steps:

• Open any dashboard and click on the panel name. A drop down will come. 
• Click on the share option. 
• One modal will come and then click on the embed option and copy the highlighted link. 

More on Performance App support in AMCOP SMO:

• Navigate to the performance tab from the left-hand side menu. 
• Find the list of dashboards with a dropdown to choose the dashboards to view, add, and delete. 
• Click on the dashboard to view the list of user defined dashboards. 
• Select or unselect the dashboards needed.lick on the Apply button to apply the changes. 
• On the right-hand side corner, there will be two buttons to add new and delete existing dashboards.
• Click on the add new button and fill in the details (dashboard or panel name and dashboard embed URL) to add a new dashboard. 
• Click on the delete button to delete one or multiple dashboards.

AMCOP O-RAN SMO

Aarna.ml AMCOP contains the number one open source SMO in the market for orchestrating and managing O-RAN network functions. It is a cloud native application that enables network operators and vendors to manage multi-vendor RAN environments and select best-of-breed network functions for validation and interoperability testing. It can be utilized in both stand-alone and non-stand-alone vRAN contexts as well as O-RAN environments. Learn more. 

We encourage to try out these performance dashboards and let us know what you find out or if you have any questions.

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In the fast-paced world of technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changer for industries seeking a competitive edge. Generative AI in particular – algorithms (such as ChatGPT) that can be used to create new content – has brought the exciting world of AI to the masses and opened up new frontiers of innovation.

No matter how sophisticated the algorithm, however, Generative AI tools are only as good as the data they process. All else being equal, the higher volume of high quality data consumed, the more insightful and powerful the results.

To truly make use of Generative AI, companies need to run Large Language Models (LLMs) on their own data and we believe that the cloud edge in a private cloud is an ideal place to collect data and run AI/ML algorithms for business intelligence. This approach ensures faster response times, heightened privacy, and unparalleled efficiency.

But deploying a GenAI foundational model from scratch is quite cumbersome and time consuming (to install, configure, upgrade, and manage the stack), and requires AI talent that few organizations have. Using a public LLM model is also fraught with security and privacy risks that are not yet fully understood. 

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To meet this pressing need, Aarna.ml has partnered with Predera, a leading provider of AI-driven solutions for businesses, to offer a Generative AI solution to the industry. This is a secure, private, and fully managed LLM where users can choose which LLM to leverage and customize (LLaMA, Dolly, or NeMo) while applying Predera’s AIQ MLOps Platform modern toolstack with Aarna.ml AMCOP for zero touch orchestration, configuration, management of upgrades/updates.

We offer a streamlined onboarding process and dedicated support to tailor the solution to meet your unique business needs and goals. 

To explore the transformative impact of Generative AI through the Fully Managed Private LLM service, read the news, see our Solution Document, and contact us for a free consultation.

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the demand for orchestration and management of complex heterogenous environments, edge services, and 5G networks has skyrocketed, prompting network operators to seek new approaches and innovative solutions. 

Aarna’s software and SaaS solutions leverage open source, cloud native, and DevOps methodologies to provide zero-touch edge and 5G service orchestration and management services for a wide variety requirements and useWe've recently updated each solution area on our website to better reflect how our innovation and leadership meet industry needs. We invite you to learn how our solutions can create value for your organization: 

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• Private 5G: Open new horizons by delivering dedicated and customizable 5G networks. With its end-to-end automation and orchestration capabilities, Aarna.ml empowers businesses to build and operate private 5G networks tailored to your specific requirements.

• Edge Multicloud Networking: Connect applications and data across multiple clouds and the edge. By automating operations and managing network resources in real time, Aarna is simplifying IT operations, improving performance, and reducing costs for businesses.

• Cloud-Adjacent Storage: Host storage for state information and specific workloads on-prem or  the network edge. By integrating on-prem storage resources with cloud-based storage platforms, Aarna.ml optimizes data accessibility, simplifies management, and reduces storage costs.

• Cloud Edge Machine Learning: Explore use cases including LLM/GenAI, smart cities, computer vision, AR/VR, and more. By bringing AI and ML capabilities closer to the edge of the network, Aarna.ml facilitates the deployment of machine learning models real-time, improves data analysis and decision-making, and enables enterprises to leverage generative AI.

• O-RAN SMO: Manage disaggregated, multi-vendor RAN environments. By leveraging Open standards and interoperable components, Aarna's O-RAN SMO allows enterprises to choose best-of-breed network functions for validation and interoperability testing. 

• Telco Cloud: Embrace the power of cloud native technologies. By leveraging containerization and microservices architectures, Aarna.ml empowers network operators to orchestrate infrastructure using private cloud, hyperscalers, and hybrid multicloud.
  

We’d be glad to discuss your specific needs and how we can help you to achieve your goals. Contact us today to discuss your requirements.

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