The question popped up in a Brain Trust session with Ilario Corna, Head of Infrastructure, Content & Operations at Talk Talk (a UK Telco). The org

The Open Source Adventures of Reaqtor

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2021-05-19 08:08:22

The question popped up in a Brain Trust session with Ilario Corna, Head of Infrastructure, Content & Operations at Talk Talk (a UK Telco). The organisation had just rolled out an objective to become the UK's "most recommended provider". As part of this strategic initiative, we had designed and implemented an Azure based solution capable of ingesting and analysing over 200 million network telemetry events per day for anomalous behaviour. Feeling buoyed by success we were wondering "which hard problem could we tackle next?"

Ilario had the answer immediately. "Oh, that's easy" he said, "I would send a field engineer out to each customer's house, run diagnostics on their broadband connection and hardware, upgrade their firmware and implement any other tweaks required. But with over 1 million customers that's not commercially feasible to implement."

After taking a sip of tea and pondering for a few moments I responded "So we have a solution, but we need to find a way to implement and scale it several orders of magnitude more cheaply. If I were in your shoes and could wave a magic wand, I'd want to be able to say something like 'Cortana, monitor the Quality of Service for each of my customer's connections, and if it's below our SLA, then run a trouble-shooter to diagnose why and then apply a number of automatic remediation strategies'. Wouldn't that be a great way to manage the network?"

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