The company was undergoing a transition to a Software-Defined Network (SDN) using a phased approach based on the recommended practices defined by their technology provider for this project, Cisco. The project involved the design of a next-generation leaf-and-spine architecture supporting 100GB network speeds, use of Cisco Equal-Cost Multi-path Routing (ECMP), and new VMware ESX virtual servers. The IT team knew they needed a technology-neutral partner to assist their efforts in closing any blind spots that surfaced in the transformed SDN environment, including both east-west and north-south traffic paths, providing 'over-time' trend analysis and reporting into business service performance before, during, and after the move to SDN, and ensuring business communications continuity and coordination across a multi-phase SDN implementation.

The company faced service edge visibility gaps due to business expansion and remote workforce transitions. These service edges included client edges, network edges, and data center service edges. The client edges were expanded virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments supporting thousands of financial services professionals who had moved from corporate facilities to work-from-home (WFH) environments. The network edges had expanded to include a corporate network added through an acquisition that needed to be merged with the company’s infrastructure. The data center service edges included an expanding mix of Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) facilities and an evolving on-premises operation. The IT team was also tasked with gaining better visibility into the company’s market data feeds environment.

The regional healthcare organization was struggling with an overload of alerts from various security tools, making coordination difficult and error-prone. The Mean-Time-to-Resolution (MTTR) was significantly higher than desired, sometimes reaching multiple weeks. The security operation center (SOC) analysts were constantly switching between security tools, spending too much time bouncing back and forth rather than quickly finding Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) to stop attacks. Coordination between the various security tools was poor and sometimes nonexistent. All these tools had excellent GUIs, but they were designed only to provide functional value within their own cybersecurity feature set and did not share data with context. What was needed was a way to quickly correlate data across multiple tools.

The health care industry is heavily reliant on information technology (IT) for its daily operations. Services critical to patient care, such as electronic medical record (EMR) applications, telemedicine, mobile health, and BYOD initiatives, are putting unprecedented strain on networks, servers, and databases. This creates significant challenges for health care providers. In addition, the health care industry is heavily regulated, with acts such as the HIPPA Act and the HITECH Act requiring strict privacy and IT security regulations. This has shifted a significant amount of responsibility onto the IT departments of health care organizations. Specific challenges faced by IT professionals in the health care industry can be segmented into three main areas: insights into the network or visibility, operational efficiencies, and user experience.

CN, one of the largest railroads in North America, was facing application performance problems and response time delays in its IT network. The network supports over 22,000 employees who rely on it for various operations such as tracking shipments in real time, processing customer service transactions, fulfilling order requests, and ensuring the efficient and safe operation of the company’s extensive, automated rail system. The company uses a variety of NETSCOUT Intelligent Data Sources in combination with several nGenius analysis modules to monitor their wide area network (WAN) links and 1,800-1,900 Cisco switches and routers. However, they were unable to pinpoint the root cause of the performance issues they were experiencing.

Saudi German Hospital-Dubai is considered the most state-of-the-art hospital in the Middle East. It operates an advanced IT network and hundreds of applications that enable an all-digital patient health record management system. The network features 3,500 nodes with virtualized server and end-user client architectures. This advanced network and all-digital environment benefits doctors and patients, but also increases the expectations of the hospital’s IT team. There is no room for error. Doctors must have immediate access to critical records and applications to make the right patient diagnosis and treatment decisions. With life-and-death consequences at stake, the network and applications must perform 24/7 with no downtime and absolutely no exceptions. With each disparate system operating in a silo and requiring different monitoring and management tools, the entire system was unnecessarily complex and time-consuming to administer.

The company was preparing to roll out a new Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to provide more detailed billing for their customers as well as detect degradations and outages, allowing faster response without customers reporting incidents. In addition, the AMI implementation would improve customer service by giving customers access to their usage information online. Armed with own analytics, customers could better understand and control their energy usage for things like heat, air conditioning, appliances and general consumption. In addition, the AMI implementation was key to maintaining the company’s good reputation as outages over a certain magnitude must be reported by federal compliance standards. IT needed to validate their ability to manage the AMI proactively in pre-production to ensure they would not risk internal or customer-facing problems. It was critical to validate the ability to proactively understand if there were problems with data from the smart meters in the AMI not coming through the gateways in the data centers prior to production deployment.

The healthcare organization was experiencing radiology application slowdown issues that were impacting patients. Doctors and nurses were suffering significant wait times of up to 20 minutes delay in pulling up cardiology images. These cardiology images were critical to have available during patients’ exams for evaluation and diagnosis. Given the nature of the cardiology practice, minutes can mean the difference between life and death. The radiology information system (RIS), that leverages the DICOM protocol (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) to communicate, was responsible for the file transfers, how the documents are stored, and how the doctors are able to access the right radiology image for the patient in question. In trying to triage the problem over a few weeks, several war room calls were conducted that included a number of the healthcare organization’s IT staff as well as third-party vendors, including the application provider. At times, there were upward of 20 people on the daily call trying to pinpoint the source of the problem. A great deal of time was lost as each vendor tried to prove it wasn’t their part of the environment which was creating the slowdown.

The global retailer was facing challenges with network uptime and ensuring availability of mission critical applications and services. Network congestion issues and lack of bandwidth were interfering with application performance. Whenever a buying office or distribution center was down for more than an hour, millions of dollars were lost. The IT team was tasked with monitoring network uptime and ensuring availability of mission critical applications and services. However, they were essentially flying blind and had to try scattershot approaches to resolving the issues. This necessitated the formation of a war room where finger pointing created delays in resolving the issues along with further consternation.

The company’s focus on maintaining a leading marketplace position means information technology (IT) leadership is laser-focused on continually evaluating internal and external business delivery capabilities and expenses, while exploring innovative options to reduce technology complexity. As part of that effort, two years ago, the BPO had established a new U.S. data center and commenced migrating existing customer services and establishing new client delivery platforms at this facility. At the same, the IT resources tasked with managing customer-facing virtual and network services delivery to customers were reporting visibility limitations associated with the installed aggregation switch and network taps. Specifically, IT teams were having issues assuring virtual and network technology performance due to their inability to see any packet traffic flowing from the aggregation switches from network taps, which were also supplied by a legacy vendor. For an IT organization focused on continually reducing complexity, the aggregation switch technology and network taps performance issues had become problematic.

The insurance company was undergoing a company-wide migration to Microsoft Lync® IT and as it was rolling out, call quality issues began to appear. The IT staff was caught up in a classic multi-vendor finger pointing exercise as they failed to isolate the source of the issues to either Microsoft Lync servers, the Audio Codes gateway or yet another vendor’s gateway. The company faced further time lost and delays in problem resolution while the customers and service reps continued to suffer through poor call experiences.

The healthcare provider was facing challenges in ensuring high-quality subscriber exchanges with their Contact Center in support of insurance issues. They were experiencing ongoing IT challenges in differentiating application, network, UC, and service interdependency performance issues. The expansion of their remote facilities environment required visibility and monitoring. The healthcare provider’s business growth presented other challenges to the IT team. Their real estate footprint had grown to a total of 75 agent locations and 125 remote sites, which all now required visibility and performance monitoring. The IT team had found other tools and approaches woefully ineffective, and they had grown increasingly frustrated regarding this lack of visibility.

The energy company was implementing smart meters across its customer base and placed a significant emphasis on performance, particularly in preventing outages and service degradations to customers. However, the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) service, i.e. the smart meters, relied heavily on network communications, making the company’s back-end infrastructure and applications subject to performance issues. The IT team needed critical visibility into the company’s virtual servers, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and collection engines across distributed data centers, all without having to move between different tools. After the AMI project was implemented, IT faced pressure to improve their troubleshooting abilities for several other business application services including Microsoft Office 365, the Outage Management System (OMS) and Crew Management System. The company needed to ensure quality VoIP services - especially from remote sites and the customer facing contact centers.

The pharmaceutical company was facing network visibility blind spots that were compromising cross-business IT success. They had issues with Unified Communications and Cisco UCS performance transparency. The company had made the strategic decision to deploy open compute technology that offered their organization increased deployment flexibility, as well as associated reductions in both capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX). Management has also established an organizational goal deploying one common performance analytics platform for use across its many information technology (IT) teams. The time came to update their service assurance and packet broker hardware. In response, the company’s satisfied its open compute platform technology goals by earlier selecting the NETSCOUT® “smart data, smarter analytics” approach, which factors a software-based appliance versus traditional hardware solution.

The high-tech company was looking to transition from a private cloud solution to a multi-cloud environment involving strategic partners like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This transition required strategic planning to ensure visibility and monitoring of applications moving to the public cloud to assure performance was not adversely impacted by lift-and-shift activities. Another technical initiative facing the IT team involved offering improved access to network packets for the IT Security team for use with downstream security tools being used at company global data centers.

The digital bank was facing several challenges. The time to resolve issues was delayed, affecting their service quality. They were also struggling to ensure SLAs with 3rd party retailers were met. The bank had set an aggressive goal of resolving all Priority 1 issues within 1 hour of being reported. However, multiple instances of slow connection and poor performance were reported with critical communication and business applications, including their main CRM/banking application. When a global public health crisis resulted in over 2000 call center agents working from home, the 1-hour resolution goal became even more critical. At that time, the work-from-home users started experiencing issues on Webex conference calls. The bank also wanted to reduce the time spent verifying availability during the nightly, manual switch over between 2 main data centers. In the mornings, they wanted to automate the set-up process in the call centers of the applications and dialers to ensure availability and performance before calls come into call center.

The leading U.S. energy company faced a significant challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The company had to send home 13,000 workers in response to government stay-at-home work orders. This sudden shift to remote work posed a significant challenge to the company's IT infrastructure, particularly its virtual private network (VPN) which had to support a much larger remote user base. The company needed to ensure uninterrupted power delivery to its customers during this critical period. The company's ability to provide uninterrupted energy was crucial, especially for hospitals and other essential services.

The agency’s data and voice network runs in a 4G environment managed by a leading telecommunications system integrator (SI). This network supports hundreds of government teams and users, and the SI regards this community as equivalent to mobile subscribers. With the security challenges in today’s geopolitical climate, the communications integrity required for effective national defensive activities is of utmost importance. As a result, the agency approached a select few industry vendors regarding viable solutions for their mobile network and user monitoring needs. Monitoring call quality from the subscriber’s perspective was atop this list. Any call quality impairments in this military environment could jeopardize the agency’s mission, assets, and the very citizens of this country. As a result, the agency wanted to enhance monitoring of their 4G mobile network performance to validate the service responsiveness and integrity provided by their SI. The agency specifically wanted to monitor LTE/EPC Network interfaces (e.g., S1MME, S5/S8, S10, and S11) and IMS/ VoIP/VoLTE protocols (e.g., Cx, IMS, IMS DNS, SIP, Rx, and RTP). Only then would they be able to visualize the service quality being provided by their SI to their government users. As part of their overall requirements, the agency also identified a need to uncover and analyze specific calls that failed to deliver required performance. Specifically, they wanted the ability to quickly focus and analyze calls with unique parameters, including merging calls for call correlation. While the government recognized the importance of this project, the relatively small user base and highly focused scope meant there was a desire to acquire the best technical solution in the most efficient, economical way.

The healthcare organization was facing a major challenge in determining the cause of slowdowns reported by doctors, clinicians, physical therapists, and nursing staff when trying to use their electronic medical record (EMR) application. The application is critical as it holds all the information related to their patient’s health, diagnosis, treatment history, medications, etc. The cause of the slowdown could be anywhere – the centralized data center, across the WAN links to the hospitals and clinics, the EMR itself, possibly with the Citrix services, or related due to something in the network at the hospitals or clinics or end-points. The IT staff was also struggling to establish application and network benchmark metrics for the services and communities necessary for understanding what represented normal, good-quality performance. They were also experiencing voice and unified communications (UC) issues, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) failures, and reports from their clinics regarding poor performance from voice and other services.

The U.S. Government Agency, focused on research & development (R&D) activities, was facing challenges with their network upgrade to 100G speeds. Their existing packet flow switches and downstream monitoring devices were not equipped to handle these new speeds and higher traffic volumes. The agency was also using 200G uplinks/ports, and the Network team had new, associated packet conditioning requirements involving de-duplication and packet slicing. All these changes were occurring in a network environment where the slightest network latency is an issue – even 1 millisecond delays are unacceptable to this agency. The agency needed a technology refresh to handle increased network speeds and advanced packet conditioning requirements.

The agency was in the process of upgrading their network to accommodate increased 40GB speeds and establishing a secondary data center to complement their primary data center operations. While the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and deployed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources provided visibility into, and real-time monitoring of the data center core and across their external network, the IT leadership team was well aware establishing a second data center and adopting faster network speeds would require additional instrumentation beyond that in the production footprint. Given the complexity of their multi-vendor technology environment, IT leadership wanted to approach this project with an agility that would support successful deployment of these new solutions without adversely impacting the day-to-day work of subject matter experts completing critical financial analysis on the nation’s behalf.

The agency was facing challenges as they made changes to their network and application strategies. One priority was to find ways to reduce Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK) in a manner that minimized the time his team spent troubleshooting, while also decreasing finger-pointing instances between IT teams. The agency had to focus on new organizational demands brought about by the COVID pandemic. Business continuity issues were spotlighted, as executives, managers, and business level staff (finance / accounting) shifted to a work-from-home model. Some of the unanticipated issues that emerged included executives and managers working from home offices and at the hospitals began experiencing business continuity issues impacting critical meetings using collaboration tools, Remote Workers using VPN services were reporting poor response time performance, intermittent issues with audio and video quality, and dropped VPN sessions, all of which were impacting their ability to do their jobs.

The airline moved from a legacy reservation system traversing its internal network to a fully integrated global, complex hybrid system. The multiple applications include loyalty membership, passenger reservations, flight closures, and more - all flowing between Equinix data centers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud environments, as well as SaaS providers located all over the world. In this architecture, AWS is the “”middleware” that links all of the information and transactional flows together. One of the unique aspects of this complex architecture is that their main airline reservation system runs in a Lambda serverless environment within AWS, which meant the airline lacked visibility to verify availability and performance of their applications.

The financial services provider identified Microsoft Azure as their organizational cloud services platform. The project was a critical undertaking for IT, involving business service & application migrations from numerous data centers to Azure Cloud services across their three geographic regions. The IT leadership team wanted to enhance the security of this solution, which led them to utilize Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, which extended the company’s on-premises network segments into Azure Cloud services using a private connection. As the IT teams worked to establish highbandwidth routers required to support the secure network connection associated with migrating large-scale, business-essential workloads to Azure ExpressRoute, they began seeing performance issues at one of the company’s data centers.

The Asian financial services leader was facing several challenges associated with ongoing data center operations and digital transformations. The CIO was concerned about improving visibility, security, and real-time monitoring of Internet and Mobile eBanking applications that were increasingly used by millions of customers for their transactions. The bank was also planning to migrate certain on-premises data center operations and application workloads to a private cloud environment. The CIO wanted to maximize metadata-based analytics to improve Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) productivity and collaboration. The existing vendor tools for network performance monitoring and packet broker functionality were neither integrated, nor equipped to support the CIO’s nearterm initiatives.

The regional financial services leader was facing challenges in assuring retail banking at thousands of regional locations. The bank's IT Operations team had specific requirements for their network performance monitoring solution. They wanted enhanced service edge visibility, user-friendly operations, and easy access to packet-based analysis. They needed to improve views into business service performance at regional bank locations and better visualization into data center operations hosted by their banking partner. They also wanted to improve visualization into the performance being delivered by two regional service providers (SPs) on behalf of the bank. The IT Operations team had goals for proactive monitoring and reduced finger-pointing that related to their expectations for better visualization into these respective SP environments.

The government agency was in the process of building out their Security Operations Center (SOC) and wanted to leverage any existing technologies they had for security purposes. They had previously purchased a small order of OCI Cyber Adaptors for visibility into their 2 main datacenters that were on opposite sides of the country. The primary use by the SOC team for Omnis Cyber Intelligence was a packet capture and retrieval function related to an incident identified in their Splunk, Security information and event management (SIEM) platform. During initial product training of their first purchase, they learned more about their current infrastructure and the visibility gaps that existed, so they purchased more cyber adaptors to fill those gaps.

The U.S.-based online mortgage broker embarked on a major Unified Communications (UC) project by migrating to a SIP trunking service. This upgrade was expected to save as much as $100,000 per month, while at the same time improving revenue opportunities by enabling outbound dialers to generate 16 times the number of calls with potential mortgage and refinance customers. However, following the implementation of the UC system, quality-of-service (QoS) issues, echo problems, switch issues resulting in dialing problems, and DNS/HTTP errors within the voice mail web app created a poor user experience. This jeopardized the success of the project and potentially harmed the business. IT faced the difficult challenge of proactively pinpointing the source of the problems, in order to rapidly triage and resolve them.

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.