The global investment bank was struggling with intermittent disruptions and outages to their critical business services. They lacked the visibility to identify or quickly resolve problems when they arose. Uptime and performance visibility were key to this team. Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) services were a particular pain point. Recently, IT had deployed a new state-of-the-art video conferencing application so that the CEO could address the company at all hands meetings. The service needed to support hundreds of employees connecting simultaneously, but the first video conference they used the service for did not go well. Calls were dropped in some cases and call quality was poor for others.

As a large American Carrier Service Provider (CSP) prepared their network to support the 5G cloud edge, they realized during the planning stage that the use of traditional dedicated COTs servers would no longer support the robust nature of their 5G edge network. The transactions at the 5G edge required extreme agility on-demand, faster deployment of services and network resources, elasticity to scale traffic up and down, and automated visibility for service assurance. The CSP needed a solution that could provide these capabilities while ensuring robustness and visibility.

A large Tier 1 Carrier Service Provider (CSP) had carefully planned coverage for their 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) network by conducting drive tests and ensuring the use of meaningful measurement thresholds to trigger usage of 5G NSA radio resources. However, recent evaluations showed that their 5G NSA network coverage excluded 26% of subscribers. The challenge was to assure complete 5G coverage for all subscribers.

The deployment of 5G commercial networks is increasing, and initial assessments of standard cell and subscriber performances for one large American Carrier Service Provider (CSP) 5G Non-Standalone network revealed extremely high overall drop rates. In a complex network environment with multivendor devices, the CSP needed to triage the possible root cause and determine the impact on 5G subscribers. The challenge was to obtain a meaningful breakdown of network data with relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for deeper insights.

The agency's mission success depends largely on quickly and successfully analyzing large volumes of data to safeguard national interests, government assets, and global citizens. To ensure the success of their mission, the agency developed and deployed an application suite that provides the ability to quickly extract meaningful analysis from always-growing data volumes. Wanting to more nimbly spin-up compute and storage resources to support these mission-critical applications and newly developed apps, a strategic decision was made to embrace recent digital transformation innovations by consolidating existing data center operations and transitioning to a commercial cloud service provider (CSP) service. As part of this process, the agency employed a government-standard procurement process, which enabled deliberate selection of best-in-industry technology to install in the new CSP. As a result, they made an early decision to invest in Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, which offered the benefits of application agility and data center automation. The move to an annual CSP service also involved use of new-to-the-agency Amazon Web Services (AWS) and virtual VMware hypervisor technologies.

The financial services organization, which operates globally to provide direct banking, financing, leasing, automotive, insurance, fleet management, and other services to customers of a particular automotive company, was facing a challenge. As the company grew, a new datacenter was needed to meet modern expanding needs. NetOps was responsible for ensuring high quality end user experience and needed a solution to restore end-to-end visibility within the new datacenter design. Virtualized environments increased the difficulty in ensuring visibility at the access level. As part of the launch of the new datacenter, security policies were tightened up, and a new policy was put in place requiring all access to production environments to go through one of two isolated DMZ’s. This created a big challenge for IT. Customers and employees of this organization rely on critical applications and business services for important functions to drive business revenue, including Citrix XenApp published desktops, Oracle, and an in-house dealer financing application published over Citrix.

The financial services group was facing challenges in delivering rapid, always-on services to current and prospective customers. Problems were going undiscovered until after they became customer affecting, and NetOps / AppOps struggled to quickly identify the root cause of service slowness. Users were frequently unable to submit online applications or loan payments because the service was so slow it would time out before completion. When customers reported problems, the AppOps team was able to observe that transaction rates were lower than expected but lacked the tools or visibility to quickly understand why.

Xtel Communications, a provider of fiber optic networking, Cloud and Voice services, was facing a significant challenge due to the lack of visibility into network traffic and the inability to provide protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. As bandwidth demands increased, DDoS attacks became more common, leading to service and performance issues. Xtel's legacy Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) were able to provide basic DDoS protection capabilities, but they were not sufficient to handle the increasing threats. Xtel needed a solution that could protect their own infrastructure and deliver a best-in-class solution for their customers as well.

The customer, a Tier 1 North American multiple system operator (MSO), offers over 30,000 Video on Demand (VoD) titles each month, with the most valuable being the pay titles, especially new releases. However, an error occurred with the movie poster server that delivers information to the set-top box. Subscribers would select a preferred title and receive something else, causing them to abandon the movie within the first few minutes of the rental. The MSO lacked direct visibility into the VoD experience from a subscriber’s point-of-view and wanted to understand why so many VoD views were abandoned within the first few minutes of purchase.

The biggest challenge facing this organization was visibility into security threats attacking the business. As a payment processor and provider of financial transaction reconciliation, promptness in completing a request is an imperative. Anything impeding the availability of these services to their clients would be financially detrimental to both the clients and the SaaS provider, not to mention the reputation of the provider. Despite investing in security tools such as a web application firewall (WAF), a DDoS attack impeded access to critical business services for almost half a day. Customers were unable to process payments or reconcile financial transactions while the attack was ongoing. Even though no actual breach occurred, the downtime and reputational damage from an attack had a significant financial impact on the business. Even worse, the existing tools that the security team was using had not helped them detect or mitigate the attack. They needed a new solution that could provide both visibility and counter measures.

The Tier 1 (T1) team at a large North American carrier were inundated with alarms indicating that 51,000 roaming subscribers were experiencing LTE connectivity issues. The initial assessment from triage to escalation endured for an average of 5 hours, with every passing minute counting against a successful Mean Time To Know (MTTK) narrative. With persistent spikes in data failures impacting multiple markets, T1 support teams must quickly assess specific networks, offending devices, and subscribers through near real-time alerting with a precise path to examine historical evidence. At the time, the T1 team faced labor-intensive workflows which prevented timely evaluations.

A nationwide wireless communications provider serving about 6.6 million customers was facing a challenge where costly engineering resources were being monopolized by trouble ticket resolution escalations, law enforcement requests, and other customer issues. In some instances, individual cases were taking up to two days to resolve. This was not only inefficient but also led to customer dissatisfaction and increased churn rate.

A cloud communications provider was facing a significant increase in trouble tickets being escalated to Tier 3 support. Most of these tickets were related to recurring issues such as one-way audio and choppy voice quality. The management challenged the support teams to retool their escalation process. The lingering trouble tickets were draining resources, with Tier 3 resources costing an average rate of $75 per hour. The company needed a solution that would allow communication, collaboration, and knowledge transfer between support tiers.

The university’s IT team was in the process of planning a technology upgrade, including cybersecurity and network solutions. During this process, the university experienced a volumetric DDoS attack that consumed university bandwidth on a targeted service. This attack coincided with the annual student “move-in” day, causing significant disruption. The IT team needed to quickly restore services to returning students and prevent future DDoS attacks. They required a solution that could support its existing Cisco infrastructure, while also scaling to their 100G network environment.

The international insurance carrier was experiencing substantial growth and decided to establish a new data center to expand their network technology operations. The legacy facility was turned into a new disaster recovery site. However, they faced challenges in gaining critical visibility in their new data center and managing their network traffic flow. The insurer heavily relied on communications with branch offices, customers, agents, and adjusters through their state-of-the-art contact centers. They deployed Microsoft Skype for Business and Cisco Jabber platforms to support agency business at branch offices. However, they faced challenges as branch offices reportedly experienced early video quality issues with Skype, which became mounting Executive-level frustrations. The success of the Insurer’s Skype and Jabber rollouts depended upon the quality of experience their agents receive from these new UC&C solutions.

The Insurer was undergoing a high-visibility branch office transformation project. The technical upgrades could not impact transaction processing or the 99.999% SLA target. The IT team was required to present executive-level evidence quantifying project success. The branch office upgrades needed to result in improved application performance across the Insurer’s business services, Unified Communications (UC), and custom applications environments. The executive team wanted statistics and all-in-one reports demonstrating these infrastructure technology changes were providing the promised branch office improvements. IT’s attempt to use another vendor’s Cloud-based Wi-Fi solution to provide required infrastructure monitoring information did not yield this necessary data.

The company's IT team was facing challenges with their digital transformation projects due to outdated IT platforms. They were struggling with transitioning applications to an off-site co-location facility, upgrading to 40G infrastructure in the core to enhance service performance, and rolling out a new cloud platform to better support business service access for home-based users. Additionally, they were dealing with current-day challenges such as reliable monitoring of wireless networks in their multi-floor corporate facilities and improving the efficiency of a legacy back-in-time troubleshooting process. The IT leaders were also aiming to improve IT collaboration and reduce the number of in-use vendor toolsets.

Mnemonic, a Norway-based company, provides 24/7 monitoring services from European based SOCs staffed with incident response teams. At the core of the Mnemonic’s solution is their proprietary platform, Argus. Argus is used to deliver its Managed Defense service that is designed to rapidly detect, analyze and respond to security threats on a large scale. Argus provides the advanced threat prevention ecosystem needed to see the big threat picture in real-time and protect customers against advanced persistent threats, zero days and targeted attacks. Any managed security service depends on on-going view of the customer’s network and the efficient functioning on the underlying security monitoring infrastructure. Employee time must be also spent efficiently, ideally mostly focused on higher-value activities such as threat investigation and mitigation, rather than infrastructure management. Mnemonic serves large enterprises and the SMB market. For enterprises with large and complex networks, ensuring consistent and enterprise-wide packet flow visibility is a challenge.

The company, a global financial services institution, was looking to enhance its security posture by adding a Behavioral Analytics Security system to its existing packet flow switching environment. The new system was to be deployed inline, meaning that traffic would be returned back to the production network after inspection. The security team also wanted to remove non-essential packets, such as backup traffic and routing protocol headers, from being sent to the security appliance, to improve system performance and reduce false positives. They also wanted to ensure that security appliances were functioning as expected through policy-based health checks. Finally, if a security system wasn’t performing, the team wanted to prevent traffic from being sent to it in order to avoid possible network disruption.

The government agency manages IT infrastructure for the country’s Ministry of finance. It is responsible for hosting online tax services, and processes tax returns for the country’s population. The agency runs two redundant data centers to ensure the highest availability of services. The organization maintains sensitive data on the entire population of the country and thus must provide the highest levels of security. At the same time, availability of services is critical as the network must be online around the clock for such a high-profile application, where every citizen can potentially be affected by a downtime. The agency must carefully balance security and privacy of citizens’ data with meeting the high standards the government has set in serving its taxpayers. The agency was in the process of deploying the McAfee IPS (intrusion prevention system) but was concerned about the potential for the security system to bring the entire network down, and with that, the reputation of the Ministry, let alone the disruption this may cause to the national economy.

The cloud service provider was facing serious quality and outage issues in their Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) which was negatively impacting the customer experience. These issues were causing service level agreement (SLA) breaches which threatened to impact current and future revenue from customers. Despite having more than a dozen existing tools at their disposal, the IT team was unable to quickly identify and resolve the root cause of the disruptions which, in some cases, were causing lengthy, full-day, outages. The impact on the IT team was a tremendous waste of time and resources. But more important was the increasingly poor customer satisfaction. The company faced the potential loss of customers from non-renewal of subscription services and loss of new customer revenue due to the poor service reputation.

The healthcare agency was implementing a Cloud-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform at over 20 locations, replacing a previous siloed solution operating on six different servers. However, they began experiencing issues with the patient records system, which interoperates with the agency’s Picture Archiving and Communications Services (PACs), radiology, and pharmacy services. The third-party vendor denied these performance problems were in any way associated with the EHR SaaS platform. As issues continued across the organization, the agency’s CTO and IT team became prominent organizational targets for user frustrations. The agency had recently added new clinical facilities that expanded the geographic reach of in-county care services. As a result, the IT team had expanded their two-site data center operations to a distributed network of six hospital and clinical facilities. IT needed visibility into the network and application environments at these new locations, including monitoring virtualized desktops. Since some of the EHR performance issues were originating at these new locations, the lack of visibility furthered hampered the IT team when it came to trouble-shooting EHR issues.

The organization’s biggest challenge was delivering a seamless monitoring experience despite rapid growth and multiple business acquisitions. There was a real need to standardize on a single solution that met all their needs to gain end-to-end visibility across the organization and assure service quality. NetOps additionally needed actionable intelligence based on current application activity and performance to help them plan for sufficient capacity to accommodate unpredictable trading markets traffic. As a financial services organization, it’s critical to have visibility into any connectivity issues end-users may experience on the trading platform. Missing a stock trade, even by milliseconds, could cost end-users millions of dollars. Visibility throughout the hybrid cloud environment was also needed to help research and resolve end-user’s trade disputes with the various trading platforms.

The government agency was in the process of transitioning their IT platforms and workloads from third-party, vendor-operated data centers to Government-owned facilities. However, they faced issues during the migration process, with application performance failures during the testing phase. The third-party Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution they were using was unable to provide granular application performance data or application profiling, leaving the IT team feeling as though they were blindly transitioning applications from the managed service to their new data center. These issues gained scrutiny at the upper reaches of the agency’s leadership, with representatives demanding answers.

The main challenge for this customer was resolving performance issues related to a proprietary application used in their regional distribution center locations. These centers were responsible for shipping products both to the retail store locations as well as delivering orders placed online directly to customers. The application wasn’t scanning inventory being compiled on conveyer belts in the centers properly, causing containers to be loaded more slowly and delaying shipments from going out in a timely fashion. The risk to the business was considerable. Slowdowns of this nature can be crippling for a retail business, delaying shipping times and causing stores to suffer inventory challenges. Customers won’t wait when a product isn’t in stock, they will just go buy it somewhere else. Revenue loss and bottom line impact is a direct effect of these technical challenges with shifts in customer loyalty as they find faster service when they explore other retailer options.

In the low-margin grocery business, every sale is crucial and every customer interaction is vital to the long-term viability of the organization. A key differentiator for the business was the introduction of a new customer loyalty program. In order to be first-to-market with this program, IT was under tremendous pressure to overcome application slowness issues that threatened the rollout. For the IT team, using packet analysis tools to try and track down the slowness issues individually was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Often, the network team was being blamed for issues that turned out to not be network-related. In addition to jeopardizing the leadership team’s Management By Objectives (MBO) program, which was dependent on a successful on-time deployment of the new customer loyalty program, IT was responsible for almost 100 other applications, supporting both store services and the distribution centers. Disruptions to the network were viewed as potentially devastating to the business and a major nightmare for IT.

The main challenge facing this bank was recurring complaints from customers of slow or failed transactions. The online banking application forms would frequently time out or load slowly, interfering with new customers attempting to sign up for the service. Payment processing was also delayed and intermittently failing, which directly impacted revenue. If transactions didn’t go through, payments could be declined, purchases could fail, all leading to very unhappy customers, potential damage to the bank’s reputation, and lost revenue for the bank. Therefore, it was incredibly urgent for the NetOps and AppOps teams to locate the root cause of any failures as quickly as possible any time an issue was reported. None of their existing tools helped to proactively identify when issues were occurring, so the only way they had of finding out when there was a problem was customer complaints, which was not ideal.

The airline's IT organization was facing a strategic challenge to upgrade their service assurance visibility. Their existing management platform was made 'end of life' by the vendor and no longer supported the modern technology and service needs of the airline organization. The IT executives wanted to reduce the complexity and costs associated with using multiple non-integrated tools from several disparate vendors. During the proposals and evaluations period, the airline suffered a costly network outage directly impacting the call centers and reservation / ticketing system, which further emphasized the need for a new network and application performance management solution.

The hospital uses remote workers, specifically radiologists, to deliver expert service to their patients. These remote radiologists consistently reported delays when logging in via VPN to access the application delivering the digital images. They also experienced very slow download times of the 100MB and larger digital files they needed to analyze. Any delay in accessing and analyzing the digital files could delay a timely diagnosis and treatment for the patient. IT faced considerable challenges in their efforts to improve the experience for the remote radiologists and help them provide quicker results. Since the radiologists were not in the organization’s offices or health centers, IT lacked essential visibility into their experience. With no data around the problem, IT was stymied in troubleshooting, not having a starting place to isolate the root cause.

The healthcare IT company is known for leading solutions in the areas of clinical electronic health records (EHR), financial revenue cycle management (RCM) applications and general operational services for small, medium and/or large healthcare organizations. Their customers expect swift responses and continuous availability to their patient and billing information. Delays in accessing this information can negatively impact prompt, efficient patient care. With innovative customer service being a guiding principle for this company, their IT staff had long relied on NETSCOUT® service assurance solutions to stay ahead of, and rapidly troubleshoot customer impacting issues.