As streaming video increasingly becomes the dominant traffic in networks, congestion has become a new type of problem for operators. These network congestion problems can result in ‘soft failures’ that cause a degraded experience for the network operator’s customers. This paper develops the mathematical theory behind using an analytics strategy to eliminate/mitigate soft failures caused by network congestion problems, and how Ciena’s Blue Planet Analytics (BPA) can be positioned/leveraged to address this strategy.