From questions to clarity: empowering telco operations teams with better observability

Can your operations team confidently answer these critical questions about your telecommunication network right now? What's the current health of services across your edge locations? How quickly can you perform a root cause analysis (RCA) of performance issues? What's the real-time status of your security and data transmission integrity? And most importantly, how can you remediate issues in a timely and price/performant way? For many network architects and site reliability engineers (SREs) managing service provider network environments, these questions reveal a critical gap in their operations.

Modern service provider environments are complex, with distributed deployments handling massive traffic loads across varying latency conditions. While service providers invest heavily in distributed infrastructure, and proprietary solutions that isolate data many overlook a critical component: unified observability. The challenge isn't just about monitoring any more. It's about extracting trustworthy and usable intelligence from a nonstop deluge of operational data to understand the overall health of the network and services so that issues can be identified and corrected in a timely manner.

Complementing observability with open source tools

A service provider can improve its observability posture by using existing tools with those built on open standards.  OpenTelemetry provides a centralized technology stack that integrates metrics, logs, and traces across the entire service provider network. By implementing lightweight observability agents optimized for resource-constrained edge locations, service providers can maintain comprehensive visibility without compromising performance, while continuing to use the same tools to gather and analyze data.

This approach can be transformative, providing:

• Enhanced visibility leading to faster issue identification and resolution
• Reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR)
• Lower operational and licensing costs through tool consolidation and talent reuse
• Secure, encrypted data collection, and transmission
• Scalability to support future network expansion
• Optimized performance, cost, and energy consumption

Standardization through OpenTelemetry simplifies integration and operation across diverse environments.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an open source and vendor-neutral observability framework and toolkit. It simplifies the process of generating, exporting, and collecting telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs, for various observability backends like Jaeger and Prometheus, as well as commercial solutions. OpenTelemetry itself is not an observability backend. Its primary aim is to facilitate the easy instrumentation of applications and systems across diverse languages, infrastructures, and runtime environments.

The Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry is based on the open source OpenTelemetry project, which aims to provide unified, standardized, and vendor-neutral telemetry data collection for cloud-native software. Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry product provides support for deploying and managing the OpenTelemetry Collector and simplifying the workload instrumentation.

 A service provider’s observability solution can grow with the network, adapting to new technologies and requirements without requiring a complete overhaul of the monitoring infrastructure.

For network architects, IT admins, and SREs, the message is clear: observability isn't just another layer of monitoring, it's the foundation for maintaining service quality and performance in complex, distributed service provider networks. Without it, service providers operate distributed  infrastructure with significant blind spots.

The path forward doesn't require a complete infrastructure overhaul. Service providers can begin by assessing current observability capabilities and identify gaps in visibility across network segments. A unified application platform can streamline operations and reduce complexity, while ensuring secure data transmission.

Service providers should not wait until visibility gaps impact service quality. They can take the first step toward comprehensive network observability now to ensure they have the insights necessary to succeed.

Take the next step

Are you a service provider ready to explore observability?

• Visit the redhat.com/observability and documentation  pages to learn more and get started with the latest observability tools in OpenShift
• Join our Telco Observability working group specializing on observability topics in Telco and Edge
• Red Hat's Developers Observability page also contains information to help you learn about and implement observability capabilities

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