Communications Company is a Hero at Marquee Sporting Event

The customer is a communications company with over 25 years of experience blending exceptional service, high-caliber entertainment, and communications products. Through multiple acquisitions and continual investment in infrastructure, they combine technology and entertainment to deliver critical communication services to their customers. One segment of their business includes partnering with large venues to provide wireless access to attendees at mega-sporting events, concerts, and other live entertainment events. These are time-sensitive and consumers expect “always-on” wireless availability and performance, just as they do everywhere they go, to enhance their experience.

The communications company was tasked with managing the wireless access at a high-profile, multi-day sporting event with international media coverage. They needed to ensure a flawless experience for the event staff and attendees, who depended on the availability of online information and wanted to follow event details from their mobile devices. However, they lacked visibility across the entire wireless access network and their existing tools did not alert them when there was an issue. They needed a solution for proactive monitoring of access and performance to quickly address user-impacting issues as they occurred during the event.

The company decided to rely on NETSCOUT’s nGeniusPULSE to monitor the wireless infrastructure throughout the event. With visibility to the entire wireless infrastructure, combined with alerts of performance issues, they quickly identified two critical issues. First, they found that the main switch had high utilization – up to 90%. Processes were being “hung” on that switch, adversely affecting performance. By reviewing the Syslog messages with nGeniusPULSE, they saw a relation to a specific packet process on the switch. With this insight, they were able to change code to resolve the issue within the first 2 days of the event. They carefully monitored the CPU throughout the remainder of the event, and received email alerts from nGeniusPULSE to ensure performance was maintained. An even more critical issue became apparent when some users were unable to access wireless connections or had very slow response times. However, the problem was not consistent, making it difficult to identify the root cause. Syslog messages were continuously showing errors and with nGeniusPULSE, they had a way to visually see in the dashboard the volume of errors. The customer quickly correlated these errors to a known bug within the wireless LAN controllers. As the access point reached a certain number of users, it would reject any new users, and users would have degraded performance. Without nGeniusPULSE, they would have misdiagnosed the issues as network congestion. They did a “band-aid” repair in the code, closely monitored it for the rest of the event, and looked like heroes to the event management staff and attendees!

• Successfully managed and improved wireless access at this high-profile event, which will help them secure more engagements/sales.
• Ensuring quality user experience and lowering MTTR when problems occur at other events by using nGeniusPULSE.
• Improved relationships with 3rd-party vendors with reports and details from nGeniusPULSE.