The most important task for any Communications Service Provider (CSP), beyond delivering services, is to assure their quality. In today’s market, customers expect near-zero downtime. Their businesses depend on it. Even slight service degradation can violate SLAs and result in churn. Ongoing issues? That can mean loss of business altogether.

To meet these expectations, CSPs must ensure not only a healthy infrastructure but also a reliable mechanism for monitoring service quality across that infrastructure. This is where assurance becomes essential.

If you’re responsible for reducing manual effort, improving customer satisfaction, and enabling automation, assurance is not just helpful — it’s foundational.

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What Is Assurance, and Why It Matters

To consistently deliver high-quality services, CSPs need to address two dimensions:

• Network Assurance – Ensures the infrastructure is performing optimally, securely, and reliably.
• Service Assurance – Ensures that services running on top of the infrastructure meet customer expectations for quality and availability.

These two domains are tightly interlinked and critical enablers of:

• Real-time visibility and control
• Predictive fault management
• Closed-loop automation

Network and Service Assurance is an important component in the transition towards Autonomous Networks, which many CSPs are currently focusing on (see our insight “Autonomous Network: Challenges and Practical Steps for Communication Service Providers”).

In fact, when TM Forum asked CSPs which areas they prioritize in their Autonomous Network initiatives, fault management and service assurance ranked highest. This reflects a clear industry shift: assurance is not optional—it’s mission-critical.

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Building Assurance that Supports Automation

The foundation for both Network and Service Assurance is telemetry. There are many types of data to collect:

• Configuration data
• Device status
• Events and logs
• Traffic and routing data
• External factors such as weather forecasts

Traditionally, data collection relied on SNMP polling, CLI, and syslog. But these methods are limited in speed and scope. Today, streaming telemetry is the preferred approach:

• Push-based and near real-time
• Model-driven to target relevant information
• Scalable and adaptable across environments

Still, it’s not just about collecting more data. As Carl Andersson writes in Creating a Data-Driven Organization, data must be:

• Relevant to the questions you need answers to
• Accurate and Complete dataset representing the true state of an entity
• Coherent by having identities allowing them to be combined/joined with other data
• Accessible and timely, therefore needs to be easy to access for a machine
• Consistent and defined, requires the same data definitions across all data with unambiguous meaning of the data

In other words—only high quality telemetry enables effective automation.

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Active and Passive Assurance: Better Together

For service reliability and SLA compliance, both active and passive assurance are essential.

• Active Assurance simulates user behavior by injecting test traffic. It’s ideal for verifying service quality proactively—especially before going live.
• Passive Assurance monitors real user traffic with no added load. It’s critical for ongoing visibility and historical analysis.

Used together, they enable:

• Real-time validation during service rollout
• Continuous performance insight during live operation
• Compliance support and SLA verification

This combined approach ensures visibility from design to delivery.

Aspect	Active Assurance	Passive Assurance
Data Source	Synthetic test traffic	Real user traffic
Proactivity	Proactive – detects issues before customers are affected	Reactive – analyzes issues post-occurrence
Network Impact	Introduces test traffic	No additional traffic introduced
Visibility Scope	End-to-end across the network	Specific points with monitoring
Resource Usage	Higher (due to generated traffic)	Lower (observes existing traffic)
Best Use Cases	SLA testing, new service validation (“birth certificates”)	Historical analysis, live monitoring, compliance verification

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Orchestrated Assurance: Breaking Down Silos

An important step in building automated operations is breaking down the silos between Network Assurance and Service Assurance. These functions must work together to deliver a unified view of performance and reliability.

For assurance to be truly effective, it must be present from the start. That means integrating assurance into the service lifecycle:

1. During design and orchestration
2. As part of service activation and validation
3. Throughout ongoing operation

This is known as Orchestrated Assurance. It enables closed-loop automation where the system not only detects issues but can also take corrective action automatically.

This approach enables autonomous corrective action, improves service agility, and bridges the traditional gap between fulfillment and assurance.

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Strategic Recommendation

To remain competitive and deliver service excellence, CSPs must elevate assurance from a just a support role to a core strategic pillar.

We recommend:

• Combining active and passive assurance for proactive and ongoing service validation
• Prioritizing telemetry quality to power automation and fault management
• Adopting orchestrated assurance to unify fulfillment and assurance in a closed-loop framework

This strategy reduces risk, enhances customer satisfaction, and accelerates the path to autonomous networks.