Abrigo is a financial technology firm that provides software solutions to financial institutions in the financial crimes and credit and lending space. They offer their customers a robust product set, including hosting critical websites in their data centers. Operating in the financial technology space, Abrigo has seen the need to provide and support software through constant evolution and innovation to meet regulatory demands, especially as they grow to support larger financial institutions. When beginning the search for a unified observability and monitoring platform, Abrigo wanted to eliminate tool sprawl and reduce alert fatigue by finding a single solution that could help them improve uptime and customer experience while monitoring their diverse internal and customer infrastructures through a single pane of glass. Security was a top concern, as well as avoiding vendor lock-in. They needed a platform that would improve key metrics while providing more resilience and automation.

iVision, a provider of fully managed enterprise-class technology infrastructure, applications, and solutions, was facing a significant challenge with configuration changes. These changes accounted for a large number of performance-impacting events, especially considering they were dealing with co-managed infrastructures spread across multiple customer locations. Prior to using LM Config, iVision used a mix of vendor-specific and third-party configuration management tools to manage networking equipment and web servers. They needed a solution that would provide visibility into configuration changes and reduce the time spent on root-cause analysis during a disruption.

HID Global, a leader in secure identity offerings, was moving towards the cloud and had migrated most of its legacy applications into Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, the company lacked the visibility it needed to monitor its Kubernetes clusters and their containerized applications, making it difficult to assure performance and availability. The company had tried monitoring its environments with Prometheus and Grafana, but only made limited progress. HID Global needed a solution to monitor all the elements across its hybrid IT infrastructure, as well as its containerized applications, from a single pane of glass.

Retune, a leading IT company in Sweden, was facing challenges with its previous monitoring tool that was not suitable for Managed Service Providers. The tool required eight servers for monitoring and the process of onboarding new customers was slow and cumbersome. The tool was also generating too many alerts and integration was difficult. Moreover, the tool was not scalable enough to keep up with Retune's growth. The company was in need of a more efficient and scalable solution that could provide a single pane of glass monitoring platform.

The financial services company was evolving a large scale multi-vendor Unified Communications (UC) rollout. The multi-step process to deliver advanced real-time communication services to the over 40 operations centers offered improved cost savings, reduced transaction time, and increased efficiency. The primary concerns of the key stakeholders responsible for the implementation were successful deployment and investment protection; minimizing the cost of ownership was important as well. IT management tasked the operations team with the development of a Video Quality Project roadmap, which outlined the processes, tool sets and hurdles impacting the initiative. The goal was to allow the video team to evolve the current reactive process to a proactive process in the identification, notification, troubleshooting and resolution of video quality issues.

The company’s infrastructure includes a complex network of offices, call centers and data centers that span five continents, as well as 40 cruise ships constantly on the move. With this globally distributed network, the company faces IT service delivery challenges that are unique within its industry. In addition to managing shore-side operations, the company has to ensure that 40 cruise ships, with each having its own campus of thousands of users, is able to communicate with headquarters as well as being capable of operating independently. It is absolutely crucial to business operations that the company’s network, whether satellite or terrestrial, be able to deliver business-critical applications and services at any given time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. An important organizational initiative is using technology to drive down internal and external communications costs. In order to reduce its telephony costs for both incoming calls from customers as well as internal communications, the company has moved to IP-based UC.

Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL) is a major utility company that serves a population of 2.6 million people in the north east of England with water and sewerage services, and 1.8 million in the south east of England where it provides water services trading as Essex & Suffolk Water. The company is recognized as a sector leader in its industry. The NWL application network plays a critical role in the company’s success, and is substantial in scope. The infrastructure base consists of three data centers, two in the north and one in the south, connected by IPoDWDM fiber connections. The data centers and NWL business office locations are interconnected by more than 50 separate WAN links, varying in bandwidth from 256Kbps to 10/100 Ethernet. More than 2,000 employees use the network, which is supported by a mix of equipment from multiple vendors, including Cisco (LAN, WAN), Nortel (LAN), and Siemens (VoIP). Primary business applications that depend on the network include desktops using the Microsoft Office suite, Citrix clients, and the company’s IP-based voice communications system. The network and service infrastructure also supports Northumbrian Water’s web presence, which is the information and contact portal for its 4.4 million customers.

Turkcell’s customers demand superior 24/7/365 service, and achieving that level of service reliability is not easy. The lifeblood of Turkcell’s business is its service performance. If there is any customer-impacting service drop off, it eventually reverberates through to its bottom line. Turkcell’s primary ongoing challenge was that it needed a performance-monitoring tool that provides end-to-end visibility based on real-time, continuous traffic-based intelligence. It also needed to be able to pinpoint performance problems quickly to reduce Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK) and to maintain a flawless customer experience. LTE control plane monitoring, user plane visibility and session tracing must all be visible, as all are indispensable to ensuring and maintaining the exceptional quality service Turkcell subscribers have come to expect. Turkcell also needed customized reporting procedures coupled with real-time intelligence regarding its LTE signaling behavior. Turkcell’s approach is to solve problems proactively, not SERVICE PROVIDER reactively, before they are noticed in their network. So, proactive alarming of budding issues was a much-coveted service triage feature that Anil Ercan Sonmez of Turkcell Operations and his team members needed.

The mobile operator was in the process of implementing its LTE test network prior to a full production rollout across its operating area. They were making a considerable investment in capital, spectrum resources and engineering time to deploy LTE, and it was critical to fully test the network prior to carrying live traffic. They saw LTE as an important part of its ongoing long-term strategy in bringing 4G speeds to the markets it served. However, they experienced a latency problem with the Domain Name System (DNS) that was preventing progress on LTE capacity testing. DNS is a critical service enabling application used by the network for establishing customer connections to the correct gateway node and by end users as well to resolve the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of a target website when surfing the Web with their mobile devices. This problem with DNS was resulting in delays to the service provider’s testing schedule.

The Bosch Group, a global provider of technology and services, faced a challenge in managing its vast network across 40 locations in the Southwest region of Germany. The network was managed by seven managers from two different locations, who were overburdened with a variety of complex tools that made the network troubleshooting process cumbersome and tedious. The managers had to manually plug into each server or network portion to identify components and then manually correlate and analyze the information. The lack of a standardized solution also made collaboration difficult, as different managers used different tools to collect data, leading to debates on information from different sources. This negatively impacted regional collaboration and made it nearly impossible to share knowledge worldwide.

Pruitt Communications, a provider of telephony solutions, faced challenges in deploying VoIP and unified communications systems for various organizations. The first step in any new rollout is an assessment to verify the readiness of the network. However, Pruitt Communications was unable to cost-effectively conduct performance testing and had to outsource these assessments, resulting in a loss of service revenue. Additionally, the company was required to troubleshoot any problems that were uncovered during the initial testing. Once the network was ready for the VoIP deployment and any problems addressed, the Pruitt team began to implement the new system. However, troubleshooting problems as they arose was a time-consuming process as Pruitt engineers had to evaluate performance, identify misconfigured devices, and simulate the performance of the VoIP system.

The power company was facing challenges with its existing monitoring and analysis equipment, which was outdated and not meeting the current needs of the large, distributed, complex environment. This left the IT support team blind to bandwidth constraints and unable to triage key services within the data center and between hundreds of remote sites. The company was in dire need of a technology refresh in order to effectively monitor WAN/ LAN links that were critical to power generation, distribution, and business applications, such as billing and other services. When remote links would go down or suffer performance degradations, payments could not be collected, which adversely impacted critically important revenue cycle management. In addition, IT was under pressure to assure the performance of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Web-based services that provide customers access to their smart meter usage data. Ensuring a good customer experience required quick response times for the network.

The company was undergoing a significant transformation in how they delivered IT services to their employees, customers, and partners worldwide. This involved a datacenter consolidation and the deployment of a new datacenter to serve as a gateway for their expansion into cloud-based services. As a longtime NETSCOUT customer, the executive in charge of network and unified communications technologies understood the importance of service assurance visibility and analysis in maintaining high-quality services for his customers and employees. The migration to a new data center and cloud services had to meet his users’ expectations, and his confidence in delivering on those demands required the addition of NETSCOUT solutions for virtualized environments. At the same time, call quality issues were increasing in the call centers, creating a need for a better monitoring solution to protect voice services driving millions of dollars a month in revenue. This solution needed to be scalable, so that many IT staff could concurrently monitor and troubleshoot voice services from different locations.

The home fashion retailer faced a challenge in effectively monitoring network uptime and ensuring the delivery of critical voice and data applications and services. Network congestion issues were interfering with application performance in both production and backup data centers. If a buying office or distribution center went offline, the cost to the business was millions of dollars every hour that it was down. The IT team was tasked with monitoring network uptime and ensuring availability of mission-critical applications and services even in failover situations. Network congestion issues and lack of bandwidth, which interfered with application performance, presented a particularly vexing problem for the team. In addition, vitally important voice services were impacted, causing IT to literally pull their hair out trying to identify the root cause of the issues.

The healthcare organization faced a major challenge when a natural disaster came uncomfortably close to one of their data centers. This prompted the IT organization to augment their existing business continuity plans. The organization needed to ensure that doctors and members had up-to-date access to patients’ records and a patient portal for information from the hospital Electronic Medical Records (EMR), even if the primary data center was unavailable for any reason. The major challenge was how to efficiently and effectively replicate the EMR applications and other existing information in the redundant data center. They needed to consider both the initial transfer and the subsequent daily updates.

The Voice Operations team of a leading Central European provider faced several challenges. The relaxation of regulations had led to increased competition and aggressive subscription pricing from competitors. The company had entities across multiple countries and had recently combined country-specific business units to form functional teams operating across larger regions. This resulted in the creation of a single Voice Network Operations team serving customers in multiple countries. However, the use of disparate toolsets across these teams was a significant issue. Some teams utilized NETSCOUT’s service assurance tools, while others used a competing solution that lacked full visibility to network performance. The provider believed that troubleshooting would be more difficult and time-consuming when multiple points needed to be checked to find an underlying issue. The use of multiple platforms also resulted in different network efficiency metrics being reported, eliminating the possibility of consistent comparisons and providing an inconsistent and unreliable view of performance. The company was also under pressure to control costs and avoid network outages that could lead to revenue loss and customer churn.

The state and local government was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They were spending a significant amount of time in the war room resolving a core service incident. They were considering various vendors including CA, Riverbed, NetQoS, and HP to solve critical IT challenges like reducing degradations and outages.

The manufacturer was facing issues with application access from their remote manufacturing and warehouse locations to their data center. Their legacy tools did not provide the necessary visibility into their Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network between the data center and their 50+ locations to see what was consuming the bandwidth and why there were intermittent disruptions. With revenue, customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and end-user experience at top of mind for this IT team, they quickly pursued a strategy to bring visibility into their domain.