Part 1 – From Alarms to Intent: Rethinking Network Operations
For decades, network operations have been built around alarms. Every OSS, every NOC dashboard, and every operational process was designed to detect faults, classify severity, assign ownership, and restore service as quickly as possible. It’s a model that has served the industry well, but it was created for an era when networks were smaller, services were simpler, and operational complexity was largely confined to the infrastructure itself. That world no longer exists.
Today's broadband networks span fiber, Wi-Fi, fixed wireless, mobile, cloud platforms, customer premises equipment, and an expanding ecosystem of software-defined services. At the same time, customers no longer judge operators on whether an interface is operational or whether CPU utilization remains below a threshold.
They judge them on whether or not the service simply works as one experience across the variety of aforementioned media and devices.
This creates a fundamental disconnect – Networks still generate alarms, but each alarm may only impact one aspect of the customers experience outcome. The ideal situation would be to understand and intercept the alarm even before it happens, and if that isn’t possible then triage with intelligence and automatically correct the issue as the alarm occurs. In any event – the industry needs to rethink the relationship between alarms, operations, and the new reality of customer expectations and experience.
The problem with alarm-centric operations
Modern networks generate millions of alarms every day. Most are informational, many are duplicates, and some are actually symptoms rather than causes. Only a relatively small number of alarms genuinely require intervention. The difficulty isn’t detecting problems - operators have become exceptionally good at collecting telemetry the difficulty is determining which events actually matter.
For example, a failing optical interface serving a redundant aggregate -ion path may deserve little attention while a minor Wi-Fi degradation affecting a premium enterprise customer during business hours could require immediate action, even if no critical alarm has been raised. Traditional OSS platforms struggle with this distinction because they evaluate the health of network elements rather than the health of customer-facing services. The network becomes the priority while the customer becomes secondary. In today’s world, that is the wrong way around.
On today’s networks, the operational focus needs to change to intent. Instead of asking, "Which device has failed?", intent-aware operations ask, "Which customer outcome is now at risk?" That shift fundamentally changes operational decision-making. Every operational event is now evaluated against business context:
- Which services depend on this resource?
- Which customers are affected?
- What is the commercial impact?
- Will the issue resolve naturally?
- Should intervention happen immediately, later, or not at all?
When operations move beyond technical health and toward business relevance, the objective is no longer simply restoring devices, it’s protecting customer experience.
Now that we have identified the problem, in our next blog in this two-part series we will explore how operators can leverage Digital Twins, operational intelligence, and causal reasoning to meet emerging customer expectations and dramatically improve customer experience.
