The customer, a leading provider of wireless voice and data services with over 90 million mobile subscribers, was evolving its current 3G network with the deployment of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) architecture for delivering high-speed mobile data services to its customers. In parallel, it was deploying IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) components to support the delivery of innovative services for its LTE customers. Due to the requirement for high availability and the high performance demands of the IMS core network, it was important for this service provider to have an intelligent, early warning system that would alert on any performance degradation that could affect user experience. In addition, this system needed to provide rapid assessment of the location, severity and impact of any problems with service delivery as well as provide a clear path to determining root cause.

The State agency was facing several challenges with its IT infrastructure. The agency had recently deployed a new data center, which had enhanced network connection speeds, additional visibility points, and a new Unified Communications (UC) Center/VoIP deployment. However, the IT teams were facing service outage and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) resolution issues that were impacting important government services. The agency was generating 450 network-related incident tickets per month, and the overall MTTR rates were higher than desired. Delays in resolving downtime issues in revenue-generating departments were exposing them to thousands of dollars in lost opportunity. Other government service delivery platforms supported by the agency’s IT team were experiencing similar downtime instances, which adversely impacted service delivery to end users and citizens.

The large Western U.S. electric utility was facing difficulty in ensuring service performance with GOOSE protocol, used for power switching, between data centers and substations. The IT team was under pressure to meet NERC-CIP compliance for safety and security with audit trails of servers and ports. Failure to assure NERC-CIP compliance could result in fines up to a million dollars per day. The IT team needed to ensure message transmissions remained within the acceptable latency range to maintain safety in power transmission. They also faced the critical challenge of ensuring the performance of its Energy Management System (EMS) on the transmission network, as well the performance of general business applications on its enterprise network.

The company had embarked on a strategic initiative to move hundreds of application services to the public cloud. Due to the importance of availability and responsiveness of their business applications, they developed a dual-cloud strategy with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and another cloud provider to host key business applications. The network infrastructure team had long advocated network performance management solutions to troubleshoot issues as they were reported. It was their mandate to ensure they had the same or better visibility and performance management resources as they moved services to the cloud. As their current troubleshooting tool, as well as their existing packet flow switches, were out of date and unable to be extended to the cloud, it became an imperative for the IT organization to find a new solution that would fulfill their need for visibility throughout their new hybrid cloud environment.

The company was experiencing on‑going issues with their CRM system at many of their locations. Slow performance and outages were causing customers to experience delays on calls and when using the online portal to manage their account and pay their bill. The 3rd party CRM vendor reported the issues were most likely due to network latency and that should be evaluated first. A separate issue was occurring at remote locations where employees accessed 3rd party Cloud applications via Wi‑Fi connection. The user experience was not consistent, with some users enjoying immediate access and quick response times and others reporting delayed access and slow response times.

The health care industry is facing the third evolutionary wave of IT with implications so profound analysts believe it is a new era of global computing. Digital Transformation (DX) will be galvanized by foundational technologies such as mobility, Internet of Things (IoT), Web 3.0, PaaS/SaaS, Big Data and Unified Communications (UC). During the next 10 years, a “digital thread” will unleash a seamless flow of data ranging from health care records and systems to patients interacting with care teams at any time and from anywhere. The shift from relying on physical assets to digital assets in the industry’s value chain is happening now, and its impact in the future will have more significance – and opportunities – than ever before. In addition, there are practical challenges to achieving a robust and functioning digital future.

TELUS, one of Canada’s largest national telecommunications companies, faced several challenges in maintaining and enhancing the end-user experience. The company operates three different networks founded on four different technologies, and the demands on their network infrastructure were significant and intensifying as consumer technology evolved. Even the slightest degradation of service, such as with smartphone call latency, could result in loss of subscribers and revenue. TELUS required complete, end-to-end network visibility of all services. Specific challenges included overseeing and monitoring LTE signaling and user-plane traffic, monitoring domain name system (DNS) and call tracing, proactively and transparently troubleshooting infrastructure issues, diminishing mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), and establishing a proactive, early-warning network monitoring process and system.

Netcontroll, a full-service network, telecommunications, and IT security consultant based in Mexico City, faced challenges in service triage for its clientele and for the company itself. The businesses and organizations they serviced relied on silo-specific performance monitoring tools, which had a domain-specific focus and thus couldn't see the whole service delivery environment. This resulted in a lack of operational visibility and vastly increased mean time to knowledge (MTTK) of service problems. Inefficient workflows from the IT team members led to extended time spent in the war room troubleshooting incidents and service disruptions, increased mean time to resolution (MTTR), and diminished staff productivity. As a result, capital and operational expenditures grew significantly.

The agribusiness company, a leading player in the food and agriculture business, faced a fundamental challenge of managing its large network while providing high-quality services and implementing service triage resolution transparently. This was a constant, unending problem and the driving force behind the organization’s network management and service optimization plans. The company required extraordinary L2-L7 service performance insight. Overseeing a large network was a fundamental challenge for the agribusiness giant. Most importantly, the challenge for the company was related to service assurance.

The large enterprise health care company was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They found that a single service-oriented approach was the most effective option. The company considered various vendors including CA, Splunk, NetQoS, HP, Aternity, and Extrahop before selecting the NETSCOUT solution to solve critical IT challenges like reducing degradations and outages.

The government agency was using the nGeniusONE service assurance platform in their centralized data center locations. However, they encountered problems troubleshooting issues that extended between their data centers and their regional offices. The tools deployed in the regional locations lacked the necessary depth to pinpoint the source of the problem and were unable to interoperate with nGeniusONE at headquarters. When issues involving Oracle database services or Microsoft Exchange services occurred, the IT team was challenged to follow the problem across the full communications path of the enterprise. The Director of Data Center operations was frustrated as his team lacked holistic visibility to perform end-to-end troubleshooting and service assurance. Furthermore, managing multiple tools and vendors was inefficient for his team, physically maintaining operation of numerous platforms and also paying for maintenance contracts with all the vendors.

The high-tech company was experiencing issues with their unified communications deployment that were difficult to pinpoint and were impacting their user community. Several legacy packet brokers were outdated and upgrading that product’s features and capabilities would require complete replacement. They work with several market-leading public cloud partners to provide solutions to customers, and in trying to deliver the highest-quality customer experience found themselves lacking visibility into the virtualized servers and the east-west traffic in these environments. Any one of these projects would require a commitment in time for vendor and solution analysis, as well as for budget justification and authorization. Any way they could possibly combine these projects would accelerate the return on investment in time and cost.

The multi-national manufacturing company relied heavily on their ERP system from SAP to operate their business but performance problems were impacting customer service, limiting revenue opportunity, and risking the company’s reputation. In many cases, it would take customer service representatives 8 – 9 minutes to enter a customer order into the system that should normally take about 1 minute. The delay was caused by slow performance with the ERP screens and the system temporarily freezing. It was not uncommon for the system to freeze multiple times during a single transaction and the customer service representatives found themselves making small talk each time. Not only did this risk damage to the company’s reputation, but it also impacted the total number of orders that could be taken on any given day which affected overall revenue. This was a critical problem that needed to be addressed. The IT team was running blind with no network, server, or application monitoring or management. They had been trying to solve the problem by manually parsing log files, which was not only time consuming but not working. They knew they needed better visibility and a tool that could point them to the root cause.

The large enterprise energy & utilities company was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They found that using a single service-oriented performance management platform was the most effective solution. The company considered various vendors including Riverbed and Network Instruments before selecting the NETSCOUT solution to solve their critical IT challenges like reducing degradations and outages.

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.

The network operations (NetOps) group at this manufacturer had historically relied on a NetFlow-based network performance management tool to monitor their corporate data center. However, this had become ineffective at providing the level of detail necessary to truly find the source of issues as the company adopted digital transformations and modernizations. Slowdowns or degradations in performance in their production, inventory, or customer resource management applications can have drastic impact on targeted business goals. The NetOps group had several strategic requirements for their new service assurance solution: the ability to analyze activity across multi-tier services – including Web, application and database servers; Internet traffic; and evaluating the performance of 50 top applications for manufacturing, billing, and customer-facing websites and portals. With the added complexity of having voice, video, and business data services that required performance assurance across a high-speed, global network, the NetOps team had scalability and consolidated analysis and views at the top of their list of requirements as well.

The division of a multi-billion-dollar manufacturing company was facing multiple concerns that needed to be addressed for achieving data center transformation. The immediate concern was ongoing issues with a mission-critical manufacturing application used for planning and scheduling materials, resources, and manufacture of their final products. Any delay or downtime with the application could result in delays or missed deliveries impacting revenue and reputation. However, they lacked the visibility necessary to proactively identify degradations in performance and quickly pinpoint the source of the issue. The company was also experiencing continual degraded performance of communications applications hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud impacting customers and employees based in 200 regional offices. The data center transformation this manufacturer had undergone over the recent years created a void in their visibility into performance across their hybrid cloud network.

The company's distributed worldwide facilities are critical to the success of product design and delivery, so employees at each location need to have comparable access and application performance to do their jobs and achieve corporate goals and objectives. However, users in Europe consistently complained of slowdowns with heavily-used applications, specifically Citrix, Oracle, and Microsoft Office365, which negatively impacted their productivity and satisfaction with IT. The applications experiencing slowdowns were in a recently virtualized server farm and IT lacked visibility into the east/west traffic in those virtualized application servers, thus impeding their ability to identify the cause of the slowdowns. In addition to this specific issue, IT knew that their new CIO’s initiative of moving services to the cloud would mean they needed to maintain visibility into applications that were moved from their private data centers to the public cloud.

The manufacturer faced challenges with outages in their customized order management application, which interfered with order processing, resulting in lost revenue and harm to customer experience. These service disruptions also triggered large financial penalties that had to be paid to the retailers. A single outage could easily trigger hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties. Lacking remote site monitoring of its custom applications, IT faced significant delays in issue detection and its ability to triage across many remote locations. The IT team had to rely on users to report issues, putting them under tremendous pressure to assure availability and performance.

Visa, a global financial services company, has a complex IT infrastructure that enables it to process transactions around the world. The company's service-delivery infrastructure spans from the backend servers to edge devices all over the world. Visa – and its customers – can’t afford service performance blind spots. Lack of visibility into the root cause of service degradations can negatively impact millions of consumers and merchants. Visa is also a practitioner of Digital Transformation (DX) and faces a multitude of challenges that come with it including speed and scale from DevOps to the production IT environment. No company understands better than Visa how the new digital thread is unleashing a ceaseless and seamless flow of data across the corporate value chain. This digital shift is a tsunami that carries with it opportunities with smart adopters like Visa redefining customer experience, operational processes and business models.

The multinational oil and gas company was under significant pressure to do more with a reduced budget. The company recognized the vital role the IT organization must play in helping to improve the business and deliver business projects on time. The chief information officer (CIO) and IT identified several-dozen key corporate applications that were deemed instrumental for delivering value to the business. Some of these applications were manufacturing, tax, and international finance services used globally across the company. Many were custom applications, web-based services, and/or relied on SAP and Citrix services for operation. In order to ensure these key application services were available around the clock and around the world, IT needed greater visibility into their virtualized private data centers that hosted them. Any delays or outages in these critical services would be harmful to various business units.

The Financial Services Company had recently implemented new contact centers to support their ever-growing number of sales agents and offices, as well as address customer inquiries as they arose. Early in the planning process, the IT staff included targeted deployment of service assurance capabilities due to the importance of high-quality conversations between customers and sales agents and service reps in the contact centers. The IT staff also identified the need for monitoring traffic utilization of their WAN links to remote offices, as well as performance over links to their cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 services. Upgrading and improving their visibility to the network traffic for performance, security, and Web traffic stats was also scheduled. However, this too was moved up on the schedule when the IT team encountered several issues with the network traffic being forwarded by their existing third-party vendor’s packet broker switches to the monitoring appliances.

The large fashion retailer was facing frequent slowdowns and performance issues with critical applications, such as voice services and the company’s point-of-sale (POS) cash register application. With no real network monitoring tools in place, IT only became aware of service degradations and outages after end-users complained about the challenges they were experiencing accessing corporate resources. As a result, IT was failing to meet service level expectations (SLAs) with the company’s network of stores. In short, employee productivity suffered and there was potential impact to store revenue. IT needed to find a way to get ahead of these problems and gain visibility at the WAN edge and in stores to proactively uncover problems before they impacted the business.

The company’s Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solutions were plagued with problems, causing significant disruptions for end users. The company was relying on several dozen monitoring and troubleshooting tools, leading to a high degree of inefficiency when it came to problem identification. The duplication and redundancy in these tools was costing the company in excess of $1 million a year in maintenance expenses alone. Lacking a single, viable tool for network and application service assurance of the entire enterprise, IT was hard-pressed to quickly identify the root cause of UC&C disruptions or remote site issues and resolve them in a timely manner.

The hospitality company introduced a new guest services application for customers to use at their resorts. The application was hosted on servers in a third-party cloud provider environment. The application team needed troubleshooting visibility, regardless of whether the application server was in the private or public cloud. The network team turned to their trusted partner NETSCOUT to bridge this gap in application service assurance visibility for the servers in the cloud.

The IT team of this BPO faced a critical challenge with a new client, of assuring that businesscritical communication and collaboration services, such as Microsoft® Office 365 and Skype® for Business, were always available for their users at remote locations. Since these services did not traverse the BPO’s data centers that were already instrumented with nGeniusONE and InfiniStream solutions, IT needed a different type of visibility for UC services at the remote locations. Without it, IT was flying blind. Ideally, what the IT team wanted was “hop by hop” analysis for rapid identification of problem domain to speed troubleshooting.

The Insurer uses a heavily trafficked public Web portal to help deliver its Workers Compensation insurance services to small- and medium-sized employers, the injured workers reporting those claims, and the Insurance Agents and Medical Providers affiliated with processing claims and delivering needed care. The Insurer’s IT team recently updated the website to support mobile device access for employers, injured workers, and other users. However, when the Insurer’s Web portal began experiencing performance issues, the IT team found it did not have visibility into internal east-west traffic in the data center’s virtualized environment necessary to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. The IT team’s existing third-party technologies did not offer necessary visibility into the virtualized environment or troubleshooting tools necessary to execute repeatable, corrective troubleshooting processes.

The State & County Judiciary network, which supports hundreds of court locations and processes millions of transactions annually, was facing several IT challenges. The network was generating more than 300,000 business transactions an hour, and any delays in logging in, accessing information, or using email could have a significant impact on the day's operations. The IT team needed to reduce the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and enhance visibility to monitor the traffic from the remote sites to the primary data center over third-party WAN circuits. They also faced the implementation of Cisco infrastructure upgrades and wanted complete 'before-and-after pictures' to ensure the new environment was properly configured. The Applications team needed a solution to troubleshoot why its newly deployed custom applications were generating performance issues in supporting service delivery to Municipal Court locations, causing user backlogs and daily transaction delays. The UC team required an enhanced solution for identifying baseline metrics (e.g., MOS) in their Cisco environment to report on voice performance issues.

The global energy company was facing the challenge of ensuring flawless performance of vital services. Any network or system disruption could harm the business and the company’s reputation for excellent customer service. The company needed not only troubleshooting ability but also end-to-end visibility and analysis allowing them to proactively solve problems before impacting customers or risking regulatory compliance issues. Additionally, the company was on the verge of a major move to the cloud to meet future requirements of the business. This meant IT needed a scalable monitoring solution that could handle current demands, while at the same time providing seamless expansion into the cloud, offering continued visibility into service availability and performance.

The IT department of a U.S. City oversees the 3-1-1 Call Center operations for the City’s non-emergency services, including processing residential service requests for such situations as street repairs, graffiti removal, illegal vending, or large bulk-item pick-up. The IT team’s annually published Strategic Plan provides multi-year quality metrics regarding 3-1-1 Call Center program goals for reducing call waiting times and minimizing dropped call instances. In addition to improving Call Center quality, the City‘s Mayor has empowered the IT department to help transform the number of digital platforms available for 3-1-1 citizen outreach. As a result, the City is updating its 3-1-1 platform to better leverage Web-based and mobile requests from residents. In providing wide-ranging support, the City’s 3-1-1 website uses form-based request templates to enable residents to issue support requests relating to non-emergency service issues.