O-RAN SMO Performance Dashboard

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 Networks 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 Networks’ 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:

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.
Add row - Group your visualization into expandable sections.
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 Networks 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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