The bank was experiencing intermittent service degradations and outages, which were negatively impacting the customer experience and jeopardizing the bank’s service reputation. The IT team was under tremendous pressure to achieve service assurance, but their tools were ineffective at detecting and resolving issues before users were impacted. They found themselves in a reactive position, relying on outdated tools to try and uncover the source of issues. The Network, Applications, and Unified Communications (UC) teams recognized the need to be more proactive and collaborative as they all engaged in troubleshooting the root cause of problems but did not have the necessary data to easily collaborate.

The national retailer faced several challenges. Firstly, the wire data collected from centralized bottlenecks obscured the origination point of the traffic in the distribution centers. This made it difficult to understand where problems were originating. Secondly, with new applications and services regularly being rolled out, the IT team had poor visibility into potential performance issues. Lastly, call quality issues were a concern as they risked harming the customer experience and thus the reputation of the business. The retailer needed a solution that could provide visibility into network traffic, monitor the impact of new applications on the network, and ensure high-quality voice services.

The company’s distributed, worldwide factories are critical to achieving overall production quotas, and they must perform as well as the main manufacturing facilities. Not surprisingly, the distributed plants rely heavily on IT technology, such as automated assembly lines that communicate instructions and status between equipment on the lines. In addition, not all the company’s remote facilities use centralized IT services; rather, they use locally hosted applications. These remote facilities are run on a “network in a box,” where VMware ESX servers are used to host manufacturing / production applications that are responsible for bar code scanning, printing, and communications as well as underlying network protocols like DNS, file services, and LDAP. These applications are critical to operating the production line and business processes at the plants. When communication between machines slows or stops, the symptoms may not be quickly apparent locally and can persist for a few hours, leading to delays on the lines, halting the lines completely, or creating issues requiring rework.

A tier one operator is looking to accelerate the uptake and use of VoLTE services. As part of a regional promotion, subscribers have been offered new VoLTE-enabled devices. However, initial employee trials with these devices in the region indicate that VoLTE call drop ratios are increasing. The operator is concerned that isolating the cause of these drops will consume troubleshooting teams and require costly escalations. Furthermore, the inability to resolve the problems quickly will delay the targeted launch of VoLTE services. There are a number of issues that can contribute to VoLTE call drops. Coverage gaps often occur due to changes in topology or neighbor cell interference. Visibility to the SIP messages between the Call Session Control Function and the Telephony Application Server can provide valuable information about current and future RAN coverage needs. Phased upgrade activities can result in mismatched software loads and incompatible handover situations between eNodeBs.

The pharmaceutical company was undergoing a strategic transition towards prioritizing the deployment of open compute platforms. The Network Infrastructure team found the open compute approach appealing due to increased flexibility and reduced capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX). However, they were also scrutinizing their investment in the packet broker hardware appliances deployed at the primary data center. The team found the packet broker appliances were costly to update, with additional hardware-based packet blades required for some new features, at additional CAPEX and OPEX. The team needed a seamless transition from the legacy network monitoring solution to their preferred open compute platform.

The Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit health care operation, faced a significant challenge when the Vocera badges used for intra-caregiver communications were not being recognized in the hospital’s neonatal clinic. The badges, which provide instant communication between doctors, nurses, and other critical caregivers, were not getting on the network properly. This was a serious issue as the badges are mission critical to the neonatal clinic. The malfunction was potentially threatening lives. The Cleveland Clinic enterprise network is vast with over 48TB of wide area network (WAN) traffic per day and 18TB per day of Internet traffic. Its data center distribution through its NFS/ SMB Windows® and Linux® servers surpasses 200TB daily. With 165,000 active ports, the Cleveland Clinic enterprise network has as its cornerstone seven Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform, which combines multiple network elements including voice, video and data solutions, and an AT&T DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) optical technology overlaying its existing fiber optic backbone.

The company’s Security Operations (SecOps) team faced new business and compliance management challenges that were surpassing current IT toolset capabilities. The New York State government had enacted requirements upon any financial institutions that required those businesses operating in NY to implement cybersecurity measures, report data breaches, identify whether the threat traveled past the point of initial infiltration, and provide associated network packet captures as further evidence of effective forensic security analysis used to successfully troubleshoot the breach. The company had to deploy a complete solution in an accelerated timeframe in order to meet a State-specified deadline for organizational compliance; otherwise, the business would be subject to government fines and adverse impacts to brand reputation. As part of strategic business initiatives, the company decided to move certain data center workloads to cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure) platforms, as well as newly added Equinix co-location facilities. However, when an Equinix co-lo facility reported an outage with Azure services, the CISO learned the company’s existing IT toolsets lacked visibility into this new hybrid cloud environment necessary for troubleshooting and remediating performance anomalies, so that business services could be quickly restored for customers and users.

The agency had recently completed a migration to a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined network (SDN) offering improved 40GB link speeds. While the technical conversion itself had completed, the regional IT team subsequently found themselves trying to work through visibility limitations in this new SDN environment, particularly involving the updated 40GB network links and within data center operations. In addition to wanting to visualize upgraded performance, another IT team involved in this project was focused on protecting the integrity and availability of these SDN links. For the IT team, this effort was critically important, as these high-speed Internet links supported customer-facing tax and financial transactions that had been targeted in frequent cyberattacks.

The organization had historically used multiple service providers to protect their globally distributed datacenters, depending on the regional availability of such services from the providers. They contacted NETSCOUT® in 2019 to help them simplify their DDoS mitigation infrastructure by replacing the different service providers with one single provider-agnostic service that could also cover all global locations. This enabled them to have a single SLA with 1 company rather than the multiple provider option, which was extremely difficult, complex and expensive to manage. In times of attack an organization needs clarity and a consistent platform to protect themselves rather than different SLA’s with multiple vendors in all locations. The company fell victim to a series of complex targeted DDoS attacks at the end of December 2019 which spilled over into January 2020. A particular application service was impacted so much that it threatened to halt all the of the company’s flights from taking off worldwide affecting all packages to be delivered.

The IT team at the Latin American retail bank was facing challenges with their existing vendor tools. These tools were reportedly difficult to manage and were unable to address hard-to-resolve issues in the bank’s infrastructure environment. The bank had also outsourced some IT administration activities to a major business consulting company, whose assigned resources were unable to reduce the lengthy mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) cycles and resolve network and infrastructure incidents. These challenges prompted IT leadership to pursue alternate solutions to address these troubleshooting issues.

The organization, a large financial center in Western Europe, was heavily reliant on its ISP for security monitoring and mitigation of potential DDoS attacks. However, the ISP was not equipped to handle larger mitigations at specific customer sites, and their priority was to protect their backbone. The organization was also concerned about meeting newly implemented banking regulations around infrastructure security specifically focused on DDoS activity. The organization's internal infrastructure was also deemed underpowered and not acceptable for battling incoming DDoS attacks. The organization realized that they were too dependent on outside management of the risks that come from potential DDoS attacks and needed to bring that risk management in-house to ensure more control and quicker reaction time.

The company, a global leader in the business process outsourcing (BPO) and consulting services industry, was facing visibility gaps in application performance and data center migration. Despite using many vendor tools, network and application performance issues had emerged in one service delivery region. Visibility gaps had also surfaced across the business, making it difficult for IT resources to monitor company business traffic, application performance at some on-premises and co-located data centers, and applications being migrated from one data center to another. The company was looking for a vendor-neutral solution that could address visibility and performance issues using real-world use cases and workflows.

The manufacturer was in the process of migrating some critical business services to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and implementing a new Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosting environment in the primary data center. They needed to ensure a consistent highest quality end-to-end visibility in the hybrid cloud. Critically important to their day-to-day operations were key business services, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP, sales operations, inventory management, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. If any of these applications experience slowdowns or disruptions before, during or after the migration process, the impact on revenue, production, and customer service can become significant. The world was in its earliest stages of dealing with the possibility of dramatically increased remote workers/work-at-home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This added to both the importance and urgency of adding visibility for performance analysis for the ISP hosting environment, given the possibility of having tens of thousands of employees working from home around the world.

The financial company was undergoing digital transformations, including data center upgrades to 100GB in their infrastructure and investments in virtualization and cloud. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced all of their employees to move to a work-from-home model. This resulted in end users experiencing availability and performance issues with critical business and communications applications like Citrix and VoIP services. Despite collaborative efforts between the application and network teams, their legacy point tools lacked comprehensive monitoring and analysis to identify the true source of many of the issues. These issues, and the extended time to resolve, presented an immediate and serious potential for devastating impact to the business.

The bank was experiencing a surge in mobile transactions which began taxing the bank’s data center network and application resources. This led to customers complaining about Web-based payment issues such as webpage latency and slow application performance. The IT team tried various approaches for solving the performance issues occurring across their mobile and Web payment transactions, including purchasing and deploying a variety of network monitoring tools, all of which were only occasionally detecting and warning of looming performance issues before they impacted customer purchasing activities. The bank’s data center network was expanding, with these new facilities requiring the same levels of visibility and performance monitoring as the current “active/active,” dual-site data center configuration. The bank needed evidence of compliance with regulations defining the country’s government requirements for secure financial operations, including cybersecurity, network, and business performance management technologies.

The major issue facing the IT staff at this bank was protecting performance of key voice and banking application services from the data centers, across their WAN, and out to their branches where slowdowns and disruptions negatively impact their customers. Bank teller applications are expected to be delivered seamlessly to the banks, as they supported their customers’ timesensitive savings, checking, loan, and mortgage transactions. The bank also prioritized voice traffic, given the high volume of customer and internal calls generated every day. Performance degradations in any of these services could slow customer service and shake customer confidence and corporate reputation. The bank was a long-time user of NETSCOUT solutions, and with several network digital transformations occurring, they had the opportunity to evaluate the existing deployment and determine the best steps for visibility and service assurance going forward. In addition to the current needs, the IT team wanted to ensure as they continued with some other strategic initiatives (e.g., moving some services to a co-lo site, increasing their Citrix footprint, upgrading segments to 10 GB, and expanding their virtualized server adoption) that the service assurance solution they decided on today would provide them with single pane of glass views and analysis into the future.

The convenience store chain was facing an intermittent problem with some of their payment transactions going missing for some credit card-based payments. The payments were being applied in store, but in some cases, they weren’t reflected on the bank’s end. This caused significant loss of revenue and reputational damage with end-users, who were placed at risk of late fees or loss of services due to payments not processing as expected. The NetOps team lacked the visibility they needed of the transactions to prove to the banks that they had taken place. As a result, they spent countless hours attempting and failing to document the lost transactions with their partner banks.

The medical center was facing a lack of visibility into their Epic EHR and Nuance PowerScribe radiology reporting solutions, which was impacting patient care and staff efficiencies. They were also dealing with tool consolidation, multi-vendor management, and operating expense challenges. The IT team was responsible for an increasing number of complex digital clinical applications, including a comprehensive Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, a voice-based Nuance PowerScribe application, and a virtual private network (VPN) and VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment. These services were recognized as business-critical to improving healthcare delivery efficiencies to patients in need, but there were consistent difficulties in monitoring them.