Smart Control Gives Rostelecom a Smarter Way to Monitor Network Quality
RTK-TsOD, a subsidiary of Rostelecom, has deployed a unified cloud-based system for monitoring network connection quality. The platform now covers around 20,000 geographically distributed sites operated by government organisations across Russia.
The system runs on the Russian Smart Control platform, which is listed in the national software registry. Unlike Western platforms such as BMC Patrol and IBM Tivoli, the Russian solution goes beyond collecting performance statistics by providing intelligent end-to-end infrastructure oversight.
Resolving Problems Up to Eight Times Faster
Each site is equipped with metrology-grade probes, high-precision sensors that continuously measure key network performance indicators, including data transmission latency, latency variation (jitter), packet loss, and actual available bandwidth. The platform compares those measurements against predefined service level agreement (SLA) parameters in real time. If performance falls outside acceptable thresholds, Smart Control automatically alerts technical support teams, allowing them to address the issue before service degradation becomes noticeable to end users.
Smart Control has demonstrated its ability to manage a large-scale distributed network. According to RTK-TsOD, incident response times have been reduced by a factor of six to eight. Service interruptions are therefore expected to become much less frequent. Digital government services, departmental information systems, hospitals, schools, and municipal operations centres should all benefit from more reliable connectivity. At the same time, Rostelecom is strengthening operational visibility across its digital infrastructure while reducing dependence on foreign monitoring platforms.
A Homegrown Architecture
Russia's IT infrastructure market entered a period of turbulence in 2022 following the withdrawal of foreign technology vendors. That shift accelerated the development of domestic infrastructure management platforms. By 2023, replacing imported software had become an economic necessity. Organisations began redesigning their IT architectures and replacing Western software, although the transition proved both lengthy and technically demanding.
By 2024–2025, the market had matured enough to move from fragmented monitoring tools to centralised cloud platforms. Analysts have identified sustained growth in demand. By 2030, the share of annual infrastructure software sales generated by Russian developers is expected to increase from 36% in 2022 to 90%. RTK-TsOD has already deployed Smart Control across 20,000 sites, representing a comprehensive modernisation of the government's communications infrastructure.
“After Western vendors left the market, many organisations were forced to operate a heterogeneous mix of legacy foreign products alongside newer, often niche domestic tools. In practice, this created a 'zoo' of monitoring and infrastructure management systems. Smart Control eliminates that fragmentation by following an all-in-one platform model. The new module continues the same approach: each new capability is delivered within a unified platform rather than as a separate product,” said Alexander Obukhov, Product Director at RTK-TsOD.
A Faster and More Reliable Digital Environment
The platform's architecture was designed to onboard new subscribers without requiring significant modifications. That makes it easy to scale. Similar monitoring systems are expected to find wider adoption beyond Rostelecom's customer base, including federal and regional government agencies, banks, healthcare and education networks, industrial enterprises, and critical information infrastructure facilities. Transport operators, energy companies, and large retail chains with thousands of branches all require comprehensive end-to-end network quality monitoring.
Future development plans include integrating Smart Control with Service Desk platforms to automate ticket creation, adding machine learning capabilities to predict failures from accumulated operational data, using artificial intelligence to detect anomalies, and expanding monitoring beyond communication channels to include the availability of business applications themselves.
Smart Control is expected to continue evolving into the benchmark platform for centralised management of distributed IT infrastructure across Russia. That, in turn, will help create a more reliable digital environment.
