NTT delivers real-time observability for global IP traffic

Overview

As one of the world’s largest telecommunications providers, NTT operates a global IP backbone spanning dozens of countries. Ensuring reliable, high-performing service at this scale requires real-time visibility into network traffic and the ability to detect anomalies as they occur.

To meet these demands, NTT partnered with Imply to build a modern streaming and analytics architecture. The result: real-time observability across the network, enabling both technical and non-technical teams to explore traffic data, monitor performance, and respond faster to incidents.

Challenge

NTT’s legacy analytics system struggled to keep pace with the demands of modern network operations.

“The system was a black box, so it was difficult to extend, troubleshoot, or adapt to new requirements,” said Paolo Lucente, Distinguished Engineer at NTT.

Scaling the system was also inefficient and costly, limiting the ability to process growing traffic volumes and preventing teams from gaining timely insights into the health of the network.

Solution

NTT modernized its analytics stack with Imply’s real-time analytics platform, integrated with Apache Kafka for streaming.

• Streaming backbone: Apache Kafka ingests high-volume telemetry data.
• Analytics engine: Imply delivers subsecond queries across high-cardinality network metrics.
• Self-service exploration: Imply Pivot empowers engineers and business teams to build dashboards, drill into live data, and investigate issues without bottlenecks.

This Imply-powered architecture removed silos, reduced operational complexity, and opened up network observability to a broader set of stakeholders.

Results

By modernizing its data stack with Imply, NTT achieved:

• 100,000+ events per second ingested with subsecond query latency
• Unified visibility across latency, routing, and packet performance
• Self-service dashboards for both technical and non-technical users
• Faster anomaly detection and response, improving customer experience

Why it matters

NTT views real-time observability as essential to running one of the world’s most critical networks—and as a foundation for the future.

“We plan to correlate more diverse data sources—latency, packet loss, routing security—to enrich our observability of traffic,” said Lucente.

With Imply, NTT not only ensures high-quality service today but also builds a flexible architecture to adapt to tomorrow’s challenges.

NTT powers its global network observability with Imply. That same technology now drives Imply Lumi, the industry’s first Observability Warehouse—delivering the real-time performance, scalability, and cost efficiency to transform your own network and operations.

See how Imply Lumi can transform fraud detection and security analytics.