The manufacturer was facing visibility gaps in identifying the root cause of SaaS/UCaaS quality performance issues. The Network Operations (NetOps) team was challenged by a lack of visibility to effectively identify slowdowns, troubleshoot degradations, and restore quality delivery quickly in their efforts to avoid negative user impact. The company was also experiencing notable performance issues with UCaaS applications, without a clear understanding of the origin of the slowdowns. Readily available, ongoing visibility at the WAN network edge became necessary to pinpoint the source of degradations and swiftly resolve disruptions.

The manufacturer had been an early adopter of software-defined wide area networking (SDWAN) technology, having transitioned from Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) to SD-WAN over three years earlier. During subsequent years, SD-WAN technology improved, and the manufacturer’s needs evolved, requiring an update to suit current and future requirements, as well as new and evolving IT landscapes. Because business continuity is critical to company operations, their enterprise IT leaders and network operations (NetOps) team were committed to ensuring the best performance of their applications before, during, and after migration from one solution to another. The stakes were high, as downtime could cost manufacturers of this size millions of dollars per hour.

Banco Votorantim, one of the largest privately held banks in Brazil, was facing challenges with its complex enterprise network that supports voice and data application services in Brazilian and international locations. The bank was committed to providing a high-quality customer experience but lacked the necessary visibility in all banking services, from online banking to branch applications. The bank's IT department had implemented a tool to troubleshoot network problems, but as the bank continued to grow its customer base and expand its locations, it needed more than the existing systems could provide. The bank required more visibility into their voice and data application services across the network for in-depth, real-time analysis, views, and reports that could be used by any of the members of their IT team. Furthermore, in the dynamic consumer finance industry, there was no room for delays or unavailability at the time of loan approval, and Votorantim was looking for an antiDDoS provider that could protect them on premise and from the cloud.

The multi-billion-dollar media company was facing several challenges in their IT environment. They were experiencing issues with VoIP and UCaaS quality, which were causing call failures, latency, dropped calls, and overall call quality challenges. These issues were problematic for employees and frustrating for network operations (NetOps). The company also faced time-consuming certificate expiration issues that impacted customer service. Their contact centers and regional offices without local IT support required visibility for troubleshooting SD-WAN performance issues. The company was also undergoing a migration of their SD-WAN solution, which was being deployed in their remote locations to assure business continuity for their employees before, during, and after transition. Additionally, they were experiencing intermittent performance degradations following network equipment upgrades and maintenance enterprise-wide, which were challenging to troubleshoot.

The BPO hosts numerous business applications in one of their technology centers, including an internally developed billing app. This billing application provided a crucial function in the healthcare’s day-to-day Contact Center operations. When a client called the healthcare’s Contact Center regarding a billing issue, the Customer Service Representative (CSR) workflow initiated a look-up from the BPO’s data lake to populate that caller’s insurance billing information on the CSR’s user interface. However, over time, the CSRs began experiencing “screen freezes” during billing look-ups, leaving them to explain these delays to customers with standard Contact Center speaking points – “The computer is running a little slow today,” for example. These scripted explanations aside, what actually happened involved the BPO’s billing application repeatedly timing out, setting, and resetting. While this represented an intermittent performance issue that inconvenienced healthcare clients on a callby-call basis, it was something that impacted Call Center Operations and CSR execution for more than one year.

Denver Health, a healthcare provider for the city and county of Denver, Colorado, was experiencing substantial wireless usage growth. They run VoIP, PACs and EMR applications throughout their network. The network team needed a network and application performance management solution to detect and diagnose problems that might arise with their applications with the escalating growth. They were also implementing a critical Voice over IP (VoIP) pilot project and needed to manage performance of voice traffic alongside other critical applications such as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), and streaming video during a time of unprecedented growth in network usage.

The financial services company had implemented third-party packet flow switches in their production environment to send network traffic to security tools and NETSCOUT’s service assurance solution. However, when one of the packet flow switches experienced an internal Tap failure, a critical link hosting one of the company’s customer-facing websites was lost. This outage not only impeded visibility to traffic for service assurance and security monitoring during that period, but it also exposed a point of failure in their architecture. The switch’s vendor provided poor customer support, suggesting that IT move line cards for the time being while removing the failed one to send back for repair. This led the IT team to seek a different solution and vendor.

The Asian environmental protection agency is highly dependent on Lotus Notes for virtually all communications – email, scheduling, document sharing, etc. When Notes is slow, productivity and collaboration grind to a halt. IT needed to improve service delivery and implement tools to respond to issues more quickly. Prior to implementing the nGenius® solution, IT was forced to search through router/switch logs, ask the service provider to check their logs, compare logs, guess at the source of the problem and then verify that the proposed solution worked. The process was tedious, time consuming and error prone.

As the organization continued to grow across different regions of the United States, IT recognized that its data centers needed to be prepared to handle the increased business demands the new business would bring. To stay competitive in today’s robust insurance environment, the company understood it was imperative to deliver innovative, state-of-the-art service to its customers. To meet this vital need, IT faced the challenge of smoothly and seamlessly transitioning to its next-generation high-speed data centers which introduced a 40GbE backbone and SDN technology as their foundation. In order to support the company’s existing portfolio of insurance services and deliver new business critical applications to employees and independent agents, IT also needed the ability to proactively predict and prevent user-impacting performance issues. This meant pre-deployment testing of new services was imperative, so IT could ensure service assurance once in production.

The IT teams responsible for supporting the company’s global voice and video infrastructure faced significant challenges due to the high volume of communication outages, dropped calls, and poor call quality within call centers and across its numerous retail stores. With thousands of inbound calls from customers seeking technical support, new product sales and internal conversations, supporting the company’s existing Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking deployment proved problematic. These unified communication (UC) issues led to a noticeable drop in customer satisfaction scores, which have long been a strategic pillar of the company’s iconic brand. Since converting to a SIP trunked topology, IT has struggled to triage and isolate connection issues and voice quality problems, even after a wholesale upgrade of all of their Session Border Controllers (SBCs). A variety of voice groups were tasked with routing calls through their aggregated SIP trunks, but because each group utilized different troubleshooting tools, there was a severe lack of correlation and communication across groups, which created inadequate and inefficient problem resolution.

The company, a leading European-based manufacturer of home and industrial appliances, was looking for ways to automate and optimize the management of their service delivery environment by predicting and preventing service-effecting problems, rather than reacting to user calls to the help desk. The company supports a large, highly dispersed organization with an extremely complex network that utilizes dozens of different WAN service providers. Any workflow interruption can back up or even shut down the manufacturing floor, impacting a well-tuned just-in-time inventory management process.

The software company was facing significant disruptions in its Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solutions. The corporate IT team was struggling to isolate and resolve domain problems due to the use of several dozen monitoring and troubleshooting tools. This resulted in a high degree of inefficiency and was costing the company over $1 million in maintenance expenses. The company lacked a single, viable tool for network and application service assurance of the entire enterprise, making it difficult to quickly identify the root cause of UC&C disruptions and resolve them in a timely manner. The company aimed to fill the gap in UCC visibility, improve operational efficiency, and drive cost savings through consolidation and standardization of monitoring tools.

The law firm, with its global presence and over 3,000 legal professionals, needed to maintain application and business service visibility across its geographically dispersed network. This included two data centers, 23 remote offices, and over 3,000 corporate users. The firm required fast, reliable access to information and clients on a 24/7 worldwide basis. They also needed to deploy a single, unified service management solution that captures, stores, retrieves, and analyzes network, application, and service delivery data. The firm's success was based on its ability to help clients consistently meet their legal and business objectives on a timely and cost-effective basis. Therefore, speed and uptime were critical to keeping clients happy and the staff fully productive. The firm also utilized several applications that assist in the storage, retrieval, and management of litigation materials. Information had to be readily available across the firm through the Internet, the corporate intranet, a networked litigation support system, and computerized databases of firm documents, library resources, and business intelligence systems.

The company's network is responsible for handling billions of transactions per day and any disruptions and performance degradation to database searches on their website results in lost revenue. In fact, site performance is so important to the business that IT staff bonuses are only paid when 99.985% uptime is maintained. Because internal systems and applications were not equipped to send alarms or report on issues, IT operations team members were strictly reactive in addressing network problems that would arise. When customers started to experience slow response times and connections to partner sites began to fail, IT was faced with the challenge of pinpointing the source of the problem. By the time trouble tickets were escalated to the more knowledgeable first level operations team, the damage was already done in terms of revenue loss and harm to the company’s reputation.

The car rental company's revenues are primarily driven by web bookings and sales, which are derived from partnerships with third-party travel and leisure sites that provide rates, availability and reservations to retail customers. The challenge faced by IT is that if the third-party travel and leisure sites don’t see quotes within 1.5 seconds, the company loses its ability to bid for customer business - losing out on bookings and revenue. The application environment is highly complex requiring multiple systems to work efficiently. For example, in order to respond to customer queries and provide accurate pricing information, the web application performs multiple database lookups to search inventory and determine the right pricing based on availability. Unfortunately, the transactions were taking too long to process. Further complicating the matter, the application performance was degraded after IT migrated from physical servers to virtual environments. The network operations team was unable to quickly determine the root cause of the outages, making it difficult to resolve. With the potential for poor partner support, poor customer experience, and ultimately, lost revenue, response time degradations were having a very real impact on the company’s bottom line.

US Airways needed to optimize and ensure the performance of its online reservation and information services it provides to customers. To manage the performance of this critical business asset more tightly, US Airways’ IT organization realized it required a comprehensive understanding of the applications and networks supporting their Web sites. The airline’s existing SNMP-based reporting tools were unable to provide the detailed, comprehensive views of the networks and applications supporting the corporate Web sites. The company first looked to NetScout when it was bringing management of the reservation website in-house from an outsourcer.

The customer, a leading provider of wireless voice and data services with over 90 million mobile subscribers, was facing a situation where several of its customers were having a problem getting authorization to the 3G network. The operations team responsible for this part of the network was unable to identify the problem with their existing performance monitoring tools even though they could see the RADIUS requests being sent from the eHRPD network. The service provider was deploying an LTE network alongside their existing 3G CDMA2000 network, and as such, required connectivity between the technology domains to assure that their subscribers will have a seamless user experience as they move from the coverage area of one Radio Access Technology (RAT) to another.

The mobile network operator in Canada was facing a challenge in migrating from their existing CDMA2000 network to a UMTS/HSPA+ network. The transition was critical to meet the increasing demand for broadband mobile applications and to introduce a wide variety of GSM Smart Phone handsets, including the iPhone. The operator planned to run the two networks in parallel while completely migrating to the UMTS/HSPA+ network over the next few years. The challenge was to minimize disruption to existing customers while introducing new services and handsets. The operator also needed a solution to rapidly identify, isolate, and resolve network problems that were disrupting services delivered to their customers.

The major cable provider, with operations spanning over half of the United States, was rolling out a new WiFi hotspot service nationwide. They needed to assure the performance and availability of the service and provide meaningful data to understand usage patterns across 2000+ hub sites located across multiple strategic locations. Since all existing users would have access to the WiFi infrastructure as part of their service bundle, maintaining satisfaction levels through this additional service was an essential consideration to keeping existing users happy, building brand loyalty, and reducing customer churn.

Open Mobile, a mobile telecommunications network operator based in Puerto Rico, was seeking to enhance its network visibility to maintain and improve its customer experience. The company was facing challenges in troubleshooting problems with LTE signaling traffic, monitoring user plane traffic for service anomalies, overseeing DNS monitoring and call tracing for causal aberrations, and controlling upgrade tasks of their network elements including SPGW and MME. Despite having a well-established technological foundation, the company was using less comprehensive packet analysis and subscriber session trace runs, which were proprietary in function and not providing an end-to-end solution. The company needed a comprehensive end-to-end, performance-monitoring tool that provided data-rich operational intelligence to allow for proactive troubleshooting.

Mitel, a business communications provider, needed a reliable network testing solution that could provide accurate details in a quick and easy-to-understand format. Managing multiple communication applications and platforms requires advanced network monitoring and orchestration to ensure optimal network performance. Mitel deployments rely on a high-performance network when delivering quality communications services. This can quickly become complicated when the customer is the one ultimately responsible for internal network performance. When issues do arise on the network, customers often look to external vendors for resolution. Mitel is often on the front line and can get calls for a variety of networking problems. To help resolve the issue, Mitel pinpoints the issue on the network. This makes identifying the root cause of networking issues vital for Dan Brown, manager of enterprise engineering, and his team.

The Everett Clinic was facing challenges with their data center and network performance. Any issues in these areas could directly impact patient care, which they were striving to eliminate or reduce. The clinic's data center is their central site and enables the delivery of their applications. If it doesn’t perform, patient care can be negatively impacted. For instance, their primary system for maintaining electronic health records, Epic, is a huge multi-tiered application suite that includes several smaller applications that all bounce from server to server, gathering data requests from different sources and funneling back responses to their clinical and administrative teams. When a doctor in an exam room wants real-time patient data, he uses the Epic system. If the performance among these servers and applications runs too slow, it can result in poor patient care.

The City of High Point, North Carolina, has a broad range of critical IT infrastructure it has to keep up and running at all times, including 24 x 7 emergency services. It also has the typical network challenges facing IT departments today: IPv6 and VoIP rollouts, Wi-Fi upgrades, database migrations, VMware deployments and more. And of course, perennially tight budgets. All of which meant the city’s IT team needed an integrated tool that would allow them to remain nimble, quickly address problems, eliminate travel and guesswork, build a case for system upgrades or changes, and more. The IT team faces two primary challenges. The first is the basic task of working quickly and efficiently to keep all of the city’s systems operating and ensuring workers remain connected. They city’s emergency services add a sense of urgency to that troubleshooting, as they must stay up 24 x 7. The IT team can’t afford days of guesswork when trying to identify and fix any issues, so for the past several years the team had been relying on an old OptiView Series III from NetScout as their go-to troubleshooting tool. The other challenge is also a common one: the IT team is responsible for a broad range of new initiatives, and planning for those deployments, testing and managing the installation, and troubleshooting any problems that arise is difficult without the proper tools.

The large grocery retailer's IT organization had embarked on a Business Services Management initiative to fulfill application and network performance service level agreements with internal customers. The success of this initiative depended on acquiring coordinated, end-to-end visibility from the end user's perspective of the infrastructure elements necessary to address requests for service. However, the company's existing tools were highly specialized and required manual correlation of different data sets to determine the source of trouble and the best approach to correct it. As a result, multiple IT groups jumped into the root cause analysis fray, which created the need for additional coordination and extended the fault isolation/resolution process.

Carrollton City Schools had routine network and application issues across its sites, yet lacked the appropriate tools to truly understand and fix the problems. What monitoring software it did have would alert the IT team of trouble, but not identify the specific problem or recommend solutions. As a result, the IT team often spent weeks or months chasing down and solving network and application issues. Complicating matters, the district was in the process of creating a BYOD environment, and the inability to pinpoint issues threatened to lose support from administrators and staff for the new capability.

Valparaiso University, located in Indiana, has a policy of 'one port per pillow' which ensures that each student in the dorms has access to at least one working Ethernet jack, in addition to Wi-Fi access. This requires the university to conduct network validation every summer. The previous process for this project was cumbersome and inefficient. The student testers had to carry around bulky laptops to every single port, plug into the drop, run various tests, and annotate the results either in a spreadsheet or by hand on a form. The laptops were not ideal for this type of work due to their size, weight, cost, and potential for damage. Furthermore, each laptop’s battery lasted only a few hours and needed re-charging at least once a day. The testing process itself was time-consuming, taking anywhere from 1-3 minutes per port.

The global hospitality and entertainment company was developing a new, high-capacity resort and casino in the U.S. The construction of a new resort and casino presented the network team with the challenge of ensuring pervasive network visibility, not just for certain segments and certain tools, but all traffic to all monitoring tools. This was critical in order to meet data privacy and network performance requirements where both regulatory constraints and customer expectations are exceedingly high. The team needed to support its service assurance and cyber security systems, and do so within tight budget constraints. Most vendor solutions were either too costly or provided limited visibility. IT needed a solution that could ensure the security of data and smooth network operations, which in turn would support delivery of the highest quality guest experience.

The BPO operator was facing challenges with its voice infrastructure issue troubleshooting which required numerous corporate resources. The company was seeking ways to reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) to improve customer satisfaction. The IT team was focused on reducing the level of effort and points of contact involved in troubleshooting and resolving voice performance issues. The company conducted proofs-of-concept with several troubleshooting and monitoring vendors and chose NETSCOUT’s Service Assurance solutions to help address these costly business challenges.

The law firm had deployed a state-of-the-art unified communication (UC) system to improve intra-firm and client communications. A significant part of this investment was the multi-screen, multi-point immersive Telepresence suites in each of their offices worldwide. However, as the usage of the system increased, the number of serious performance problems, including dropped users, rose in incident and severity. The IT staff initially turned to their traditional telephony tools to investigate the occurrences and resolve the problems, but the traditional tools were all showing “green lights,” indicating normal operation. With little visibility into the Telepresence system and its problems, the IT staff was growing increasingly frustrated and spending too many hours trying to identify and resolve issues in a largely haphazard manner.

The healthcare provider was preparing for a new infrastructure equipment implementation and had concerns about the switch vendor’s ability to deliver specified performance. This was crucial for achieving service assurance for IT. After a recent implementation, IT began to experience issues with ports on the newly deployed switches tied to failures attributed to the small form factor pluggable (SFP) transceivers. The existing networking monitoring solution wasn’t able to detect the failures that were causing server performance degradations. The data center engineers recognized the need to validate their fiber cables and SFPs in order to isolate failures. Effective network analysis was required to identify port level errors.