Beyond Monitoring: Why Observability is the Backbone of Next-Gen Service Provider Networks

From wireless to wireline, Cyient is advancing network intelligence with fiber as the backbone of next-gen connectivity.

Your network sees everything—but do you? In an era where milliseconds matter and outages cost millions, fiber observability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s your insurance policy against invisibility.

Telecom networks have evolved from straightforward systems into sprawling ecosystems with multiple vendors, layers of technology, and highly distributed components. As networks scale, traditional monitoring tools struggle to keep pace. Many are still reactive—alerting teams only after something has gone wrong.

That’s where fiber observability comes in.

And no, this isn’t a rebranded monitoring tool with a new coat of paint. It’s a fundamental rethinking of how networks are managed—moving from reactive to proactive, from fragmented insights to a holistic, intelligent view of the network's health, behavior, and performance. You’re not just observing an event, you’re understanding why it’s happening, what caused it, and how to prevent it from happening again.

From Reactive to Proactive: The Shift in Network Monitoring

Historically, network teams have relied on siloed tools, reacting to faults after they occur. But with today’s complexity, waiting for things to break isn’t just inefficient, it’s risky. Imagine a fiber cut at a remote aggregation point during peak hours—without observability, you’re scrambling blind. With it, you’ve already rerouted traffic before the first complaint hits.

This kind of proactive response isn’t just smart, it’s critical. Downtime is expensive, both financially and reputationally. Global 2000 companies lose an estimated $400 billion every year due to unplanned outages. For most enterprises, one hour of downtime costs over $300,000.

Traditional tools offer limited visibility—basic metrics, alerts, and logs. They tell you something’s broken, but not why or what else it might affect. Fiber observability correlates data across physical, transport, and application layers, delivering real-time insights into what’s happening and what’s likely next. Whether it’s a drop in signal strength, abnormal port behaviour, or upstream congestion, observability reveals the root cause and enables faster resolution. No more guessing. Just clarity, context, and control.

Fixing the Plumbing: Unifying Data for Intelligent Operations

But clarity isn’t the end goal, it’s the starting point. The real power of fiber observability lies in how intelligently it connects the dots. According to APMdigest, only 10% of organizations have fully adopted observability practices across their infrastructure and applications. This signals a significant maturity gap, particularly when it comes to unifying diverse data sources.

The core of observability is removing silos, bringing together metrics, logs, traces, alarms, and diagnostics from every layer. It’s about creating a common data layer that delivers clean, correlated, and contextualized insights. Building without a solid data foundation is like finishing the paint and interiors before running the plumbing... it looks complete, but won’t work when it matters. With the right foundation, capturing all key data insights from the network's many moving parts, AI and analytics can detect degradation early, troubleshoot faster, and prevent outages.

This is what makes observability powerful. It doesn’t just show you what’s happening. It shows you why, and what to do next. But intelligence means little if it doesn’t improve outcomes for customers.

Designed Around Customer Experience—Not Just Infrastructure

And ultimately, that intelligence has to serve one purpose: better customer experience. Today, most problems are detected only after users report them. That’s no longer acceptable.

With observability, telcos can correlate data across fiber links, routers, and apps to resolve issues before they affect service. It reduces mean time to detect and resolve (MTTD/MTTR), increases first-time resolution, and improves satisfaction. According to APMdigest, 82% of organizations still take over an hour to recover from service disruptions. That’s too long in a world that demands instant, always-on connectivity.

Observability empowers remote diagnostics and accelerates intervention. Instead of reacting to customer complaints, telcos can anticipate and prevent issues, often before users even notice. This shift from reactive to proactive care is what keeps subscribers loyal. Moreover, observability enables automation. With the right set of data and intelligence collected from the network, automation systems can proactively respond to various scenarios—be it a surge in capacity demand, congestion, failures, or other challenges, ensuring seamless network performance.

But the real opportunity goes beyond preventing complaints. It’s about preparing networks and organizations for what's next.

Laying the Groundwork for Future-Ready Networks

As telcos evolve into tech-driven organizations, automation, programmability, and AI are becoming a priority. Observability is the foundation of this shift. Before intelligent systems can operate, data must flow—clean, contextual, complete. From there, machine learning can predict failures, trigger fixes, and continuously adapt.

Future-ready networks require localized decision-making, at the edge, near users, or across distributed layers. This enables real-time, AI-powered intervention, making autonomous networks practical.

Here’s how to build that foundation:

Step 1: Customer Understanding & Strategic Context

• Understand business goals, KPIs, SLAs, and pain points
• Review current technologies and use cases
• Capture future roadmap:
  • Expansion plans
  Tech shifts (XGS-PON, Cloud, 5G backhaul, etc.)

Step 2: Asset & Topology Discovery

• Consolidate asset data (CMDB, GIS, spreadsheets, etc.)
• Capture physical & logical topology: access, aggregation, core
• Identify:
  • All data sources: Logs, PMs, OTDR, SNMP, Alarms
  • Service-to-asset mappings
• Assess telemetry capability of devices (OLT, ONT, Switches/Routers/Servers/ 5G/Fiber network devices)

  Normalize data formats & ensure integrity.

Step 3: Network Architecture Review & Gap Analysis

• Assess current OSS/BSS systems
• Identify interfaces/ integration capabilities & gaps
• Map current vs. target-state observability posture and architecture

Step 4: Telemetry Pipeline & Integration Framework

• Set up real-time telemetry infrastructure
  • Protocols: SNMP, gRPC, NetConf/YANG, sFlow, Kafka
• Ensure secure & scalable data ingestion (streaming + batching)
• Enable time-series storage & fast querying (InfluxDB, Prometheus)
• Add semantic context (IDs, locations, device roles)

Step 5: Visualization & Alerting Layer

• Role-specific dashboards:
  • NOC: real-time alarms, fault maps
  • Field Ops: fiber break locations, alerts
  • Executives: KPI trends, uptime% %, CX
• Correlate multi-layer alerts for faster RCA
• Enable proactive alerts: thresholds, anomalies, predictive triggers

Step 6: Insights, Analytics & External Integration

• Deliver enriched insights:
  • MTTR, MTBF, Fiber Health, App Performance
• Integrate with:
  • OSS, ticketing (ServiceNow, Remedy), Inventory, data lakes
• Automate case creation & routing

Step 7: Advanced Automation & AIOps Enablement

• Build feedback loops: anomaly → alert → ticket → resolution → learning
• Enable self-healing workflows:
  • Auto-reboots, failovers, re-routing
• AI Models for:
  • Failure prediction
  • Maintenance optimization
  • Capacity planning

Future-Ready Extensions

• Digital Twin for simulations
• Customer Self-Service dashboards
• End-to-end telemetry performance integration
• Sustainability metrics (energy use, green SLAs)

This structured approach transforms observability from a reactive tool into a proactive enabler of network intelligence, scalable across cloud or on-prem environments, and critical for telcos and communication service providers building autonomous, future-ready networks.

Cyient’s Role in Accelerating Observability

Cyient brings a unique blend of deep domain knowledge and cutting-edge digital capabilities. With over three decades of experience working with Tier-1 telcos across wireless and wireline domains, we understand the intricacies of complex networks.

We’re not just technology experts, we’re systems integrators. We know how to break down vendor silos, stitch together diverse technologies, and build unified solutions. Our accelerators, AI/GenAI capabilities, and expertise in data engineering and cleansing give us an edge.

It’s this combination of insight and innovation that makes Cyient a strategic partner in driving the observability transformation.

Conclusion

Fiber observability is about more than just enhanced visibility. Seeing the network is just the beginning, observability is about knowing exactly what to do next. It marks the shift from reactive maintenance to proactive network intelligence. In today’s always-on world, downtime is not an option. Observability gives telecom providers the tools to deliver performance that is not only reliable, but also built for the future.

About the Author

Ashish Bansal
Sr. Director, Business Development, Telecom, Cyient

A seasoned technology leader with deep industry expertise, driving innovation and digital transformation across the telecommunications landscape. With a proven track record in next-generation networks—including 5G, 5G Advanced, ORAN, and Private Networks—this professional brings a forward-thinking approach to OSS transformation, cloud computing, and IoT. Their experience also extends to wireline and fiber technologies, where they have architected high-performance, scalable solutions that power network evolution, accelerate business growth, and elevate the customer experience.