The bank’s IT team had long monitored overall performance of their virtual private network (VPN). The VPN represented a significant element of the IT delivery infrastructure – at times, nearly half of the bank’s employees used the remote network to conduct business from their home offices or mobile devices. Also accessing these same services were several thousand authorized, strategic partners and contractors, placing additional volume on this environment. For the IT team, VPN performance management was not as straightforward as assuring adequate bandwidth coverage was in place. The VPN also supported a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) based on Citrix technology that was showing performance strains based on increased users. Remote users reported regularly experiencing frozen virtual desktop screens and timeouts, with associated issues summarized in the trouble tickets forwarded to the Help Desk.

The company's call center agents began experiencing issues with dropped voice calls, resulting in customer service exchanges being interrupted before completion. Regardless of call status, telephone call lengths were varying from agent to agent, with customer exchanges abruptly dropping after 30 minutes. In addition to dealing with customer service issues and frustrated call center agents unable to perform their duties as a result of the dropped calls, the company was unable to consistently meet negotiated Service Level Agreement thresholds regarding voice performance for the companies they were contracted to serve. Existing third-party tools being employed by the IT team were unable to view the call flow architecture in a manner required for successful troubleshooting.

Hostopia, a leading wholesale provider of private-label Web services, was facing a significant challenge in mitigating the ever-increasing frequency, size, and complexity of DDoS attacks against its network infrastructure and customer services. The technical team at Hostopia had been effective in dealing with DDoS attacks of several gigabits in magnitude, but the effort required was significant. This process required a lot of manual work by several key staff members with very specialized skill sets. Looking to the future, Hostopia realized that scaling its response would be difficult given the anticipated growth in the size and frequency of these attacks. The company was looking for a holistic solution—one that not only would detect DDoS attacks but would also defend against them.

Banpará, a retail bank in Brazil, was facing a significant challenge as it sought to expand its network. The bank's ambitious expansion plans required a technology update. With an extensive network of its own, the bank needed proactive monitoring to prevent service issues. The bank's growth and the nature of today's financial market required technological controls that far surpassed the resources of Banpará's legacy systems. In order to maintain the availability of the bank's services as well as uninterrupted and secure IP communications, Banpará needed to update its infrastructure. They were in the market for a less reactive and more proactive monitoring structure.

The division of the company had initially deployed a NETSCOUT solution for troubleshooting data issues for the monitored IoT devices in the wireless network. This was already in place in three data centers in major cities across North America. The next challenge was to provide the division with additional instrumentation for the customer expansion underway due to the rising adoption rates of IoT. New data centers were needed – located in mid-sized cities or using various commercial data centers to complete coverage for IoT traffic and to provide geographical load balancing. Mobile users of IoT present a special challenge and geographic load balancing must be implemented in a sophisticated way to ensure that mobile IoT sessions have their control plane and data plane traffic associated so that effective troubleshooting can take place. DNS services, RADIUS and DIAMETER protocols, and address resolution capabilities are the functions which were most critically in need of improved monitoring and better Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). Since this IoT transport service was being provided to clients who, in turn, had multiple customers using their end-to-end IoT services, billing information also needed to be tracked through the system. At the same time, troubleshooting tools needed to extend all the way to the edge, allowing the identification of individual users. Finally, both network security and network/ application performance needed to be monitored closely to ensure continuous availability since the IT staff needed to be able to quickly determine whether a security threat or an infrastructure performance issue required attention.

The medical supplier had recently merged with a former competitor and was facing challenges in integrating the two companies' real-time monitoring environments. Both companies were using NETSCOUT service assurance and smart visibility solutions, but the configurations and usage varied significantly. One of the supplier’s newly acquired distribution facilities was relying on a legacy InfiniStream to generate packet capture (PCAP) exports used in their post-incident forensic analysis activities. However, the appliance was not deployed in a solution architecture equipped to passively monitor the high-volume, north-south network traffic required for proactive nGeniusONE monitoring or provide visibility across the server, network, data center, and cloud/virtual service edges. This became problematic when a distribution outage occurred at the location where this legacy InfiniStream appliance was deployed.

The Independent School District (ISD) in Texas had not experienced any significant attacks or a high volume of attacks over a period of two years, so they believed that the DDoS protection provided by their internal infrastructure, namely their firewalls, was sufficient to meet their needs. However, their needs changed once the pandemic hit and they were forced to move to a virtual environment for everything their students and teachers required access to on the network. During testing and prior to the school year they did not feel any effects from DDoS activity, so they assumed their firewalls were taking care of it. Once the school year began and the network was overwhelmed with legitimate users in the form of teachers, students and parents attempting to gain access to virtual meetings, virtual classrooms and email, the cracks began to show and many of the districts’ stakeholders could not access the network. This was determined to be the combination of the illegitimate traffic along with legitimate traffic overpowering the system.

The financial institution was facing serious issues with their current DDoS protection vendor. The vendor provided a hybrid solution with an on-premise component as well as a cloud component. However, the system was failing due to service-related outages caused by software updates by the vendor. The organization was looking to replace their current system with an always-on cloud solution only. They believed that they did not require anything on premise as they had before when employing an always-on cloud solution. However, NETSCOUT Representatives made the case that always-on typically means always monitoring but not always mitigating. The reason for this is that pushing all of the network traffic to a cloud scrubbing center and then returning it the network could result in severe system latency.

The holdings company and banking institution, while benefiting from centralized IT efficiencies, have separate network infrastructures, business services, and capital expenditure (CapEx) processes. This occasionally prompts sequential, rather than concurrent, adoption of common vendor technology platforms. The challenges for work-from-home (WFH) employees included access to, and reliable performance of Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for secure business application use, Oracle services, and VoIP and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) service quality. These issues remained largely unresolved, despite in-place vendor troubleshooting toolsets in the holdings company environment. This frustrated both employees and the IT resources tasked with troubleshooting and mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) functions without single-pane visibility into how these solutions operated in home office environments.

The medical center’s IT team was responsible for an increasing number of complex, patient impacting applications and systems used for electronic health records (EHR); including radiology and medical imaging, Health Layer 7 (HL7) interoperability, centralized blood management, oncology treatment, telehealth, storage management, and patient identity management. Their challenge was to provide pervasive visibility into the organization’s clinical applications for troubleshooting, application service assurance, and problem identification before they became disruptions. They were also dealing with existing issues with their Nuance PowerScribe, a voice-based application offering voice-to-text support for radiology reporting. Issues with this service were intermittent and frustrating to users and IT. Lacking visibility into unified communications (UC) technology and/or service dependencies, the IT team could not pinpoint root cause. From a networking perspective, the IT team needed visibility to troubleshoot and deliver service assurance for users connecting through their virtual private network (VPN) and VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. COVID-19 pandemic drove dramatic increases in use of telehealth services, collaboration tools (such as Zoom), and work-from-home for employees. This made reducing mean time (MTTR) to resolution with VPN and VDI issues that much more critical for the IT team. Gaining visibility into the organizations high-speed network as well as their VMware ESX environment was also essential.

The bank was undergoing multiple digital transformations, which prompted the need for service edge visibility and proactive monitoring enhancements. The bank's transition of some on-premises data center operations to a third-party private cloud environment raised concerns about vendor compliance with their Service Level Agreement (SLA). The bank's Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) environment had already been migrated to the private cloud, and IT specialists in voice and video performance were similarly hindered by the blind spots in the new private cloud environment. The bank's increased use of Web-based platforms prompted a corresponding need to visualize and monitor those Webservices consistently, in real-time, rather than relying solely on troubleshooting as incidents occurred.

The agency’s Network Operations (NetOps) team was tasked with assuring a successful data center operations technology refresh and migration to an on-premises environment. They had relied on NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution with InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances to monitor the agency’s existing network and application activity and knew from trended reports that the new data center was going to require an upgrade to high-speed links in their environment based on increased traffic volumes over time. This would also require that the nGenius Packet Flow Switches (PFSs) and ISNG appliances could monitor at the new network speeds to assure visibility as traffic transitioned to the new network and continue real-time monitoring after the migration. As part of ongoing agency data center transformation planning, NetOps had also identified a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) architecture as the next-generation solution best-suited to respond to their evolving network demands. In making the decision to move to Cisco ACI SDN, NetOps was motivated by potential reductions in cost, complexity, and IT overhead in managing performance across their distributed environment. Given the criticality of network performance to this agency’s mission success, NetOps had heightened concerns about outsourcing operations to any third party, particularly focusing on loss of IT control and security, as well as the need to realize performance that complied with the agency’s negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with contracted third parties.

The financial services company faced a series of project challenges, some of which coincided with business continuity and service delivery transitions necessitated by the pandemic. The IT projects were critical to sustaining high-quality service delivery to millions of investment clients. The company had developed new, digitally delivered products and services to better serve their clients remotely. These Web-based applications for wealth and asset management required enhanced visibility to support real-time IT monitoring. The company's global business growth led to associated demands on the networks supporting regional operations. The IT teams overseeing these regional projects subscribed to a phased approach to these multi-tier network expansions. The company's data center operations were expanding internationally to meet increased business service delivery requirements, and the IT team knew providing access to network resources closer to the users would reduce latency.

The company’s online application services require constant availability, with consistent responsiveness and performance for their tens of thousands of clients and millions of end-users accessing essential information. The company had recently experienced more than a dozen outages lasting in excess of five hours to triage, troubleshoot, and resolve. In some cases, they required a war room to be spun up involving 20 or more IT staff, vendors, and third-party service providers at all hours of the day and night. Not surprisingly, some of these protracted outages gained the scrutiny of the new CIO and led to the formation of several action plans to reduce and avoid similar future incidents.

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.

The institutional investment bank, based in the U.S., faced the considerable challenge of achieving service assurance for more than 150 customer-facing applications. These investment banking application services were supported by multiple data centers, which compounded the challenge. Disruptions to supporting services included DNS look-up delays, Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) configuration issues, and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) delays. These disruptions risked impacting customer investment transactions, which could potentially harm the bank's reputation and customer satisfaction.

The State’s IT team was experiencing an annual 30% increase in network traffic due to an increase in users and applications. The IT Help Desk required Network Operations Level 2 & 3 forensic triage support for issues that could not be resolved by in-place tools. There was also an expanding need for remote “do-it-yourself” network analysis by local agency technicians. The Network Operations team was increasingly challenged to answer Help Desk calls related to troubleshooting specific network and application performance issues that could not be addressed by in-place third-party solutions. Such requests frequently required leveraging days of wire traffic for packet-level forensic analysis. In addition, with the expanse of the respective agency functions and the geographic locations being served by the IT organization, the Network Operations team saw growing requests for certain network troubleshooting services to be coordinated by local IT resources directly employed by respective agencies.