Recently, a global electronic commerce and cloud computing company had service issues on leased dark fiber. This fiber interconnects their global data centers, transporting all network services and applications for their customers. The company experienced several network outages due to fiber breaks, outages that affected many of their customers who could not access the website or their applications. The company asked their dark fiber vendor to dispatch a technician with a portable instrument to troubleshoot the network. However, it often took hours and even days to get a technician out in the field. Service troubleshooting and restoration was so poor in some areas that the company decided to find their own fiber monitoring solution to quickly pinpoint issues and push dark fiber vendors for faster mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

The challenge Cisco faced was how to efficiently test the stateful reliability of the ASR’s enhanced charging service function, which is part of the packet data network gateway (PGW), at a highly scaled level of network traffic load.

The organization needed to quickly ascertain the impact and exposure due to the SUNBURST hack of December 2020.