Idea 11, an Australian IT company specializing in digital transformation, cloud infrastructure, software development, and managed services, was facing a challenge with its previous monitoring tool, PRTG. The tool required extensive manual labor and was not able to scale with Idea 11’s rapid growth. The company was growing by 50% year-over-year and needed a more cloud-centric monitoring solution that could scale with its growth. The company was looking for a single SaaS-based monitoring platform that could provide a single pane of glass for monitoring and allow the business to better serve its customers.

NTT Com Managed Services, a global managed services provider, required granular visibility into its IT environment, along with current, accurate configuration data. The provider relied on its ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB) to provide a single system of record for its IT organization. However, to gain the level of insight required across all these environments, NTT needed a monitoring solution that was tightly coupled with its CMDB. Its existing monitoring system provided some automation but supported only one-way integration with the ServiceNow CMDB. To fully connect the two systems, NTT had to manually specify in the CMDB system the specific components that would be tracked in its monitoring platform.

EMC Insurance Companies was looking for a scalable solution to extend network visibility from the main campus and two data centers to 16 branch offices and five service centers in a cost- and resource-effective manner. They needed to assure high-quality service performance and optimal responsiveness to end users while keeping pace with new service roll outs and new technologies. The company’s core networked business services include insurance policy transaction processing, claims processing, image processing, email, Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing and Internet. Most of the claims and transaction processing applications are programmed in-house using Unisys’ Business Information Server (BIS) programming language and database. These business-critical applications run primarily on two Unisys mainframes where the bulk of EMC’s business-critical information is processed and stored. Web servers provide the front- end interface between the independent agents and policyholders, and the mainframes.

Cerner Corporation, a healthcare technology company, faced the challenge of assuring performance, availability, and quality for its cloud-based service for digitized patient information across medical offices and hospital systems. The company needed to maintain system responsiveness and carrier-class level network uptime of 99.999% availability. It was also crucial for Cerner to assure network and application service-level performance to protect the end-user experience. Over the years, Cerner has seen substantial growth, including a threefold increase in the size of its network, users, and the number of applications and user sessions. As a result, instant access to information both internally and externally became a critical component to Cerner’s services and a major factor in assuring customer satisfaction. In the past, when there was an issue, limited visibility resulted in Cerner operations teams diving into a lengthy investigation and resolution process that impacted and possibly jeopardized compliance with contractual SLAs. Due to the critical nature of the services offered by Cerner, SLA violations can result in negative operational and financial consequences to their clients.

The hospital has recently undertaken several major IT initiatives that impact all functions of the IT department. One of the most significant projects is an institution-wide rollout of a Cerner® Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system that connects and provides critical care collaboration between physicians, staff, and patients. The Cerner EMR solution also automates processes between departments such as emergency care, laboratory, surgery, radiology, and pharmacy. The new EMR system also includes a hospital-wide Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system and Picture Archiving Communications System (PACS). The EMR system is cross integrated into a number of different applications such as Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems as well as the Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems that transfer patient data between caregivers and are extremely critical to the hospital operations and patient care activities. Other applications and services that are vital to the operation of the hospital include Microsoft® Exchange®, Oracle®, and Lawson™ ERP systems. In addition, Voice over IP (VoIP) along with telemedicine video conferencing have become an increasingly important application for the hospital as they facilitate real-time consultation between medical specialists located on and off campus. The ability to provide always-on access to all of these systems is critical to the effective operation of hospital and patient care services.

The leading sector index options trading firm and one of the largest liquidity providers in Exchange Traded Funds was facing challenges with their network performance. The network regularly experienced traffic bursts which caused retransmissions and delayed transaction speeds. Their existing historical reporting tools offered only five- or fifteen-minute averaging, which did not provide the granularity needed to see when and where these spikes were occurring or to determine the cause of these threshold violations. In addition, troubleshooting was tedious and frustrating as the tool could only capture packets on demand, making it challenging to catch intermittent problems in action. The need for millisecond-level visibility into market data transactions drove the move to permanently instrument key locations to provide a unified, end-to-end approach to evaluating application performance and latency issues.

The company was facing bandwidth issues across its extensive global network, impacting user experience and potentially threatening business activities. With the construction of a new global headquarters and the introduction of new services, the IT team needed to ensure the network could handle the demands of technology development, manufacturing, cloud services, and retail sales and service. The wide area network (WAN) operations team needed visibility into the specific business services in use and the QoS classes assigned between data centers, headquarters, retail locations and manufacturing areas in order to achieve more effective capacity planning and respond more quickly to network changes.

Unified Communications (UC) tools promise to provide web and video conferencing, instant messaging, voice, desktop and data sharing across multiple devices and media with exceptional user experience. However, the performance of UC applications is highly dependent on the infrastructure that it runs on. Problems within this IT environment will degrade UC performance and it can happen anywhere and at any time. Common problems include quality of service (QoS)/DSCP mismatch, signaling failures such as errors between the call server and session border controller over a SIP trunk, Active Directory not configured correctly, packet loss and jitter. UC users thus experience poor call quality, call and video latency delays, one-way audio, grainy video, or static noise during video conferencing.

The energy company was facing significant service assurance issues across multiple data centers and hundreds of remote branch offices. Degradations and slowdowns in customer-facing web-services like online access to outage maps, bill paying history and smart meter data were unacceptable. The inability to rapidly identify service availability issues associated with the company’s customer resource management (CRM) system, and pinpoint slowdowns in the customer portal for interactive power control, online bill pay and power outage reporting, left customer satisfaction at risk. Furthermore, any delay in the company’s ability to use their applications that track fleet vehicles for effective response to repair and upgrade orders exposes the company to higher expenses associated with staffing, service restoration and vehicle maintenance.

Nephos6, a professional services firm specializing in IPv6 and Cloud Computing, was tasked with quickly building a network capable of demonstrating multiple key IPv6 technologies in support of customer training and transaction programs. The challenge was to validate and test designs, manage and troubleshoot deployments, and monitor for unauthorized/rogue IPv6 Devices. The company needed a comprehensive, portable, and remotely accessible tool to support these key activities. The company was looking for a tool that could provide fast and accurate device discovery, identification of tunneling protocols, and easy-to-use tools for troubleshooting integration issues.

Hawaii Health Systems, a not-for-profit hospital system with 13 locations across 5 islands and 4500 employees, transitioned to a new electronic health records (EHR) system. This system connects more than 4,500 employees via wired and wireless networks, and processes patient data back to a hosting location in New Jersey. Due to the importance of this system to the providers, and the fact that it relies on a high-performance network, the organization couldn't afford to have problems linger. They needed a tool that could instantly troubleshoot both wired and wireless network performance problems and help them isolate root cause fast. Before getting the OptiView XG®, they used to rely on end point devices, such as a laptop to run ping tests for wireless issues. But then they had nothing to verify coverage or end-to-end connectivity. For the WAN, they actually had to go to individual switches to look at ports and see if they could isolate errors that way. It was incredibly time intensive and very manual. And for an organization spread across multiple islands, the term “truck roll” takes on an entirely new meaning.

The North American service provider was in need of an effective monitoring solution that could provide pervasive visibility into network traffic for service assurance. The solution had to meet state-of-the-art performance requirements and stringent budget parameters. It also had to provide a solid foundation for both current and future business requirements. The network engineering team was tasked with finding a monitoring solution that could accommodate a range of coverage areas, including new data centers, as well as greater penetration into existing ones. The right solution would have to feature state-of-the-art performance standards in port density, filtering ability, and interface speeds ranging from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps – all while meeting the company’s budget parameters.

The Financial Services Company had selected the nGeniusONE service assurance platform and InfiniStream appliances to address quality and performance issues impacting their unified communications services at their distributed contact centers. As the IT team was implementing the equipment, they encountered several issues with the network traffic being forwarded by their third-party vendor’s packet brokers to the InfiniStream appliances. Trying to resolve the issues related to packet de-duplication became next to impossible due to product inefficiencies combined with poor customer support and insufficient knowledge from the equipment vendor. Recognizing that NETSCOUT® offered a broad selection of packet flow switch solutions, the IT staff accelerated their schedule for a technology refresh to meet their visibility needs.

The company’s strategic IT plans included implementation of a more agile and expansive “leafand-spine” network design that would offer reduced performance latency across the business. Along with those network changes, the company also made the decision to migrate data center operations, including moving from one location to another facility and opening a second using an Equinix colocation site. For the company’s long-time IT team, all this business growth meant there were more network traffic elements, business services, and new vendors involved, which increased the need for real-time service assurance and performance management. While IT had maximized the lifecycle of their legacy network monitoring tool, this team also knew that new network traffic growth and data center complexities would outpace the capabilities of that solution. In addition, the voice team also sought expanded data retention capabilities to comply with new legal directives, but the IT team was wary of adding more appliances and capital expenses to meet these requirements.

The federal government agency is a massive enterprise with a sprawling IT infrastructure. It has over 617,000 employees and handles more than 3.5 million emails per day. Its Unified Communications (UC) capacity hosts 85,000 meetings per month, representing more than 26 million minutes of conference time per year. The agency's computer network links more than 32,000 facilities performing two billion scans a day, and its centralized supercomputing capability processes data from each product piece within 50 to 100 milliseconds. The agency's website had more than 4 billion page views in 2014 alone with more than 3.9 million unique visitors to its home page, and oversaw 3.3 million in online product sales. The communications network supports and maintains more than 168,000 computers, 310,000 hand-held scanners, 81,000 printers, 12,500 smart phones. The unrelenting daily demands made on its sprawling network and systems resulted in inevitable service performance issues with lots of time spent in the war room per incident.

The large enterprise telecommunications services company was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They found that using a single service-oriented performance management platform was the most effective solution. The company agreed that the top reason for purchasing NETSCOUT solutions was to optimize the performance of their IT services.

The U.S. division of a global auto manufacturer embarked on a data center consolidation effort with the goal of lowering risk and decreasing time-to-market with Cloud and application deployments. They needed to deploy new application services faster, reducing the rollout of new services from four months down to one day. Another major challenge was to assure performance of the design and build application services across a distributed infrastructure where all production facilities had to connect back to the data center. Failure to connect to the MPLS or WAN, and to the critical design and build applications, can stop the production line, disrupt the manufacturing cycle, and impact bottom-line revenue. IT was under tremendous pressure to manage the implementation of a Cisco ACI-based software-defined data center, as well as put in place a single solution to monitor their plant and office automation tools. A further challenge was the need to monitor manufacturing plants without installing agents on the production network.

The global agricultural, construction and forestry equipment manufacturer was facing the challenge of ensuring flawless access to its network and applications, as well as communication systems. The company’s existing monitoring solution was only capable of reactively troubleshooting TCP traffic and offered limited DNS support and insufficient packet capture capacity. The IT team needed to replace their reactive troubleshooting platform with a proactive solution that could provide both detection and troubleshooting, so the team could fix problems before they impacted end-users. A solution was required that would offer robust application visibility with large packet storage and retrieval ability for data analysis of vital ecosystems. In particular, IT needed application analysis on UDP traffic, as well as Layer-2 analysis. A new solution would have to include an end-user view and performance metrics for on premise and hybrid cloud applications, such as the company’s new Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) deployment – a combination of Cisco voice and Microsoft Skype for Business technology. In addition, IT needed a highly scalable solution to meet the volume requirements of their expansive infrastructure, one that would provide simple workflows in a single product.