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.

Nephos6, a professional services firm specializing in IPv6 and Cloud Computing, was tasked with quickly building a network capable of demonstrating multiple key IPv6 technologies in support of customer training and transaction programs. The challenge was to validate and test designs, manage and troubleshoot deployments, and monitor for unauthorized/rogue IPv6 Devices. The company needed a comprehensive, portable, and remotely accessible tool to support these key activities. The company was looking for a tool that could provide fast and accurate device discovery, identification of tunneling protocols, and easy-to-use tools for troubleshooting integration issues.

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.

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

Hawaii Health Systems, a not-for-profit hospital system with 13 locations across 5 islands and 4500 employees, transitioned to a new electronic health records (EHR) system. This system connects more than 4,500 employees via wired and wireless networks, and processes patient data back to a hosting location in New Jersey. Due to the importance of this system to the providers, and the fact that it relies on a high-performance network, the organization couldn't afford to have problems linger. They needed a tool that could instantly troubleshoot both wired and wireless network performance problems and help them isolate root cause fast. Before getting the OptiView XG®, they used to rely on end point devices, such as a laptop to run ping tests for wireless issues. But then they had nothing to verify coverage or end-to-end connectivity. For the WAN, they actually had to go to individual switches to look at ports and see if they could isolate errors that way. It was incredibly time intensive and very manual. And for an organization spread across multiple islands, the term “truck roll” takes on an entirely new meaning.

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 North American service provider was in need of an effective monitoring solution that could provide pervasive visibility into network traffic for service assurance. The solution had to meet state-of-the-art performance requirements and stringent budget parameters. It also had to provide a solid foundation for both current and future business requirements. The network engineering team was tasked with finding a monitoring solution that could accommodate a range of coverage areas, including new data centers, as well as greater penetration into existing ones. The right solution would have to feature state-of-the-art performance standards in port density, filtering ability, and interface speeds ranging from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps – all while meeting the company’s budget parameters.

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 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 company’s health and safety management system is critical for not only protecting employees and the environment, but also for maintaining regulatory compliance. This system monitors air, water, and waste management, as well as loss prevention, document management and integration. Much of this relies on “always-on” digital services. This puts IT under significant pressure to be more proactive in ensuring quality and availability of critical services to avoid stiff regulatory fines/penalties which can range into the billions of dollars, and reputational damage with the public. To streamline IT services, the company decided to migrate vital systems to a hybrid cloud environment. It was critical that performance after the move be equal to or better than the existing on premise applications and that they have the ability to address issues quickly. IT needed a way to maintain visibility and assure services before, during and after migration to this new hybrid cloud environment. To achieve this, they needed end-to-end troubleshooting capabilities across the hybrid cloud in order to prove exactly where problems originated, ending time-wasting finger-pointing, and enabling collaboration with third-party vendors to resolve issues quickly.

The company’s strategic IT plans included implementation of a more agile and expansive “leafand-spine” network design that would offer reduced performance latency across the business. Along with those network changes, the company also made the decision to migrate data center operations, including moving from one location to another facility and opening a second using an Equinix colocation site. For the company’s long-time IT team, all this business growth meant there were more network traffic elements, business services, and new vendors involved, which increased the need for real-time service assurance and performance management. While IT had maximized the lifecycle of their legacy network monitoring tool, this team also knew that new network traffic growth and data center complexities would outpace the capabilities of that solution. In addition, the voice team also sought expanded data retention capabilities to comply with new legal directives, but the IT team was wary of adding more appliances and capital expenses to meet these requirements.

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 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.

Tinker Federal Credit Union was facing challenges in managing vendor tasks and ensuring that all vendor management efforts and documents were centralized, current, and exam-ready. The credit union needed a solution that would help them efficiently manage their vendors, update policies and procedures, and ensure that all documents were up-to-date. The task was particularly challenging given the size of the credit union and the fact that the vendor management coordinator had only recently taken on the role.

Direct Federal Credit Union was struggling with managing compliance using manual processes. The institution relied on decentralized compliance, where compliance responsibilities were delegated to senior management throughout the credit union. This method, while ensuring an enterprise-wide approach to compliance, added organizational challenges. Documentation, policies, and procedures were kept in Excel files throughout the credit union, making it hard to be certain the most up-to-date version was being used. Task management was also a chore, with regular email reminders getting lost. Researching NCUA rules and answering management questions could take anywhere from 3 to 20 hours, depending on the complexity.

Lafayette Federal Credit Union, a smaller credit union based in Rockville, Maryland, relies heavily on third-party vendors. Over the years, regulators have shown increasing interest in how Lafayette manages these relationships, especially with critical vendors. The credit union was in need of a more efficient solution to manage the growing volume and complexity of vendor management, while trying to limit expenses. The challenge was to find a cost-effective solution that could handle the increasing volume and complexity of vendor management.

Emery Federal Credit Union faced a significant challenge in managing their third-party vendors. The compliance and security officer, Troy Cyrus, was overwhelmed with the task of regularly monitoring vendor documents to risk rate vendors. This process was time-consuming and labor-intensive, requiring him to review every report and agreement, sometimes more than once, to identify critical or high-risk vendors. The task was so daunting that Cyrus was given eight weeks solely dedicated to getting a handle on vendor management.

BancorpSouth, a rapidly growing community bank with approximately 280 locations, did not have a centralized vendor management program until 2016. Instead, individual relationship owners across the bank's footprint were responsible for contract management and due diligence. The bank needed a software and services solution to centralize thousands of vendor relationships and improve tracking of regulator and audit findings. The bank also wanted to save time and money by identifying and preventing auto-renewals and ensuring that bank-specific vendor documents are used.

The credit union was facing several challenges in managing its vendors. The existing vendor management system was only used by two people in the ERM department to conduct an annual risk assessment. It lacked the functionality needed to properly manage vendor due diligence, including summarizing contracts and their costs. As a result, the credit union’s operation was inefficient and was often missing key contract provisions. One full-time employee spent half her time managing 30-40 vendors, while the compliance officer in the risk department spent a large percentage of her time chasing the due diligence materials required for annual reviews, with no time for in-depth due diligence reviews.

The $1 billion-asset credit union was looking to create an enterprise risk management (ERM) function, including compliance and internal audit, and needed a solution that would address all elements of risk management. However, their current vendor management solution, Venminder, was a stand-alone product that couldn’t integrate into any other solutions and presented other issues. The credit union struggled with sluggish vendor onboarding and vendor-owners wasted hours trying to collect and review vendor documentation in an effort to limit costs. The reports generated were not always accurate, which raised red flags for the credit union.

In 2019, Citizens National Bank realized they had outgrown the IT-built intranet they’d been using for several years. It simply served as a document repository without the option to categorize or search the contents. Communicating to all employees was also cumbersome. The bank did not allow employees to send emails to all employees; so when an important communication needed to be sent, employees had to forward such information to someone who was enabled to send to all. Digitizing the bank and improving the ability to do more with digital assets became a primary focus.

Rockland Trust, a bank with a mix of commercial and consumer loans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, has grown significantly over the past decade, acquiring several banks and expanding its loan portfolio. With continued regulator and examiner scrutiny of banks’ Reasonably Expected Market Area (REMA), Allen Bernier, vice president compliance and fair lending officer at Rockland Trust, wanted to ensure his institution was taking all the necessary steps to ensure compliance. One of his chief tasks is ensuring that his bank doesn’t have unchecked Redlining risk. When using a competitor’s HMDA product, Bernier’s team would spend all day tweaking data and working on the formulas. This left them with very little time to focus on analyzing the most important thing—what the data actually meant.

MercadoLibre, the largest online marketplace in Latin America, was facing challenges with visibility into their distributed applications and dynamic hybrid cloud infrastructure. They had been using various open source tools to monitor their framework, but these disparate solutions made it difficult and time-consuming for them to correlate telemetry data from across their stack. The constant changes being made by separate teams in a shared hybrid cloud environment proved to be too dynamic for these basic monitoring tools to handle. They needed a tool that was purpose-built for monitoring multiple applications in a dynamic hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Blue State Digital (BSD) had a complex stack with multiple tiers of web services, databases, and load balancers that relied on varied systems including Linux, PHP, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and more. They were also in the process of migrating sections of their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to further support rapid infrastructure growth. As BSD moved to a more dynamic cloud environment that included automated server provisioning, manually updating server counts, instrumentation and alerts were beginning to take up a lot of time and overhead. They needed a monitoring tool that would easily integrate with their existing technical setup and scale effortlessly alongside their infrastructure.

GameChanger runs a complex and elastically scaling cloud infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support its mobile and web-based applications. This environment includes multiple databases and services, each of which requires monitoring. Taking data from tens of thousands of sources, transforming it into reader-friendly snippets, and then pushing it to fans in real-time means GameChanger has to be ready to handle high traffic, heavy I/O and to troubleshoot issues at a moment’s notice. GameChanger first built its own infrastructure monitoring tools in-house from the open-source components Graphite and StatsD. These homegrown monitoring tools got the job done but at a steep price: they required an extra $1,000 of AWS resources and more than half an FTE’s hours each month just to keep GameChanger running.

CircleCI's team was using several patched-together monitoring tools. As CircleCI's application infrastructure scaled, it became tedious to track the health and performance of their servers, databases, and other IT components as they had to spend hours every week manually correlating the outputs of their existing monitoring solutions. The final straw occurred when CircleCI missed an outage that should have been caught early by its monitoring system. Lowe knew then that he had “hit the limit with [their] tools” and needed to implement a more effective and sensitive monitoring solution that would scale automatically with CircleCI’s growth.