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 was facing issues with application access from their remote manufacturing and warehouse locations to their data center. Their legacy tools did not provide the necessary visibility into their Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network between the data center and their 50+ locations to see what was consuming the bandwidth and why there were intermittent disruptions. With revenue, customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and end-user experience at top of mind for this IT team, they quickly pursued a strategy to bring visibility into their domain.

The 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.

The California government agency, being the second largest integrated municipal health care system in the United States, faced several challenges. The agency needed to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT), Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), virtualization, cloud and continuous software delivery. Moreover, endemic digital services vital to health care providers include electronic medical records (EMR), electronic health records (EHR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as well. And that’s not all. Oracle® databases, Microsoft Exchange® email services, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives and policies are essential for health care provider teams and the industry at large. Thus, the requirement to have comprehensive end-to-end visibility of the entire IT infrastructure is mandated by the seamless flow of crucial, mission- and patient-critical data. In fact, EMR requests alone are literally made millions of times a day. As complexity grows with digital systems and automation, so does the opportunity for things going wrong anywhere along the service-delivery path and this can severely diminish patient care. That means the IT organization must get ahead of service performance problems before they become health care problems. Some of the specific challenges this Southern California agency grappled with are: Understanding capacity utilization, Automatic, end-to-end awareness of all service dependencies and interrelationships within the IT chain, Maintaining an evolving IT infrastructure, Automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes, Isolating and resolving service-delivery infrastructure problems, Clinical application availability 24/7/365, Contextual analysis for applications and digital services.

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.

Agilent Technologies is transitioning to a digital business model that heavily relies on cloud technology. The company plans to digitize life sciences through various initiatives, including building Internet of Things (IoT) connected lab tools and offering SaaS-based laboratory management software. This shift to the cloud has led to a significant increase in network traffic across the company's 120 locations. To manage this, Agilent implemented a software-defined wide area network to increase bandwidth and availability for critical services. However, the company needed to assure service quality and performance across its global network and retain corporate control over public and private clouds.

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 global retailer was facing challenges with network uptime and ensuring availability of mission critical applications and services. Network congestion issues and lack of bandwidth were interfering with application performance. Whenever a buying office or distribution center was down for more than an hour, millions of dollars were lost. The IT team was tasked with monitoring network uptime and ensuring availability of mission critical applications and services. However, they were essentially flying blind and had to try scattershot approaches to resolving the issues. This necessitated the formation of a war room where finger pointing created delays in resolving the issues along with further consternation.

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 City's Police, Fire, and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) teams were operating separate call management technologies, leading to inconsistent response times and effectiveness. The City's annual voice call volume for these services reaches into the millions, further prompting the need for call management synergy between the departments. The City IT team sought to integrate these services on a single 911 system in redundant data centers, enhancing disaster recovery preparedness. They required next-generation Service Assurance technology for quick resolution to issues.

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

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

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 agency was in the process of upgrading their network to accommodate increased 40GB speeds and establishing a secondary data center to complement their primary data center operations. While the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and deployed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources provided visibility into, and real-time monitoring of the data center core and across their external network, the IT leadership team was well aware establishing a second data center and adopting faster network speeds would require additional instrumentation beyond that in the production footprint. Given the complexity of their multi-vendor technology environment, IT leadership wanted to approach this project with an agility that would support successful deployment of these new solutions without adversely impacting the day-to-day work of subject matter experts completing critical financial analysis on the nation’s behalf.

The agency's IT visibility requirements had evolved due to emerging remote service delivery challenges. The currently installed solution was not delivering network visibility as promised, nor visualizing user experience across agency operations. The agency needed a solution that could provide continuous monitoring of end-user experience, real-time awareness of impairments detrimental to strategic, worldwide communications, intuitive and compressed IT workflows for rapid triage, and support for historical analysis and investigations based on full-packet captures. The agency also preferred a packet-based, vendor-agnostic solution that could be integrated with other installed technologies, while also improving the use and value offered by those tools.

The city's IT team had successfully migrated applications like SAP, Salesforce, 311, and Microsoft Office 365 to a mix of multi-cloud, virtual, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms. However, the mix of vendor tools deployed years earlier for network and application monitoring no longer delivered the visibility required to assure reliable performance. When problems did occur, there were War Room occurrences where this same lack of visibility extended IT frustrations, with time-consuming cycles spent on troubleshooting and remediating issues. The lack of meaningful visibility in key locations across their end-to-end environment became more magnified during the city’s rapid transition to a hybrid workforce, with 50 percent of employees moving to at-home office environments and the balance continuing in mission-critical on-site roles at regional government facilities. The IT team’s inability to visualize and monitor user experience or service performance over their virtual private network (VPN) only added to their War Room instances.

The European insurer faced a challenge when they had to transition to a hybrid workforce due to the pandemic. This transition led to a 300% increase in virtual private network (VPN) traffic. The insurer's internal communications increasingly relied on Microsoft Teams, Cisco UC, Polycom, and Genesys solutions being accessed over the VPN and Internet links, all of which needed to be managed by the Performance Team. The IT team did not have the necessary views into the remote network environment, UC&C applications, or quality of user experience. The company’s internal business operations were increasingly crucial in supporting the insurance subsidiary’s abilities to address customer policy claims, financial processing, and questions.

The utility company had outsourced select IT operations to third-party providers, including corporate network oversight. However, there were disparities in the quality of performance analytics and troubleshooting provided by the two IT teams. The grid IT team was using the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to manage high-quality service delivery for its grid network. But when an issue traversed to the corporate network, the third-party IT team experienced challenges and lengthy delays trying to identify root cause. As a result, they were not providing comparable intelligence in the joint War Room sessions, which led to the grid IT team being called in to help resolve issues within the corporate network.

The overriding mission of this organization’s IT team is to optimize the availability, performance, and security of the applications, communications, and networking systems used between personnel around the world and departments and agencies they work with. This required comprehensive network and application performance visibility, continuous monitoring and automated remediation processes, and orchestration of security and network management systems. Ultimately, a key goal and driver for visibility into these services was to additionally ensure quality end-user experience from dozens of global locations. Regardless of whether personnel were using Microsoft Office 365 (O365) or Microsoft Teams, Web and cloud services using HTTP and DNS, or accessing data centers over VPN or with virtual desktop interfaces (VDIs) like Citrix, the users expected and required a high-quality, seamless experience.

The manufacturer was implementing several strategic initiatives that would transform many of their traditional network, data center, business, and UC technologies. These included converting their remote site connectivity with the introduction of Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) technology from Silver Peak to their 200+ worldwide locations, migrating their corporate data center applications and services to private Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure, implementing Microsoft Office 365 enterprise-wide, and transitioning global communications from Microsoft Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. However, the IT organization’s installed performance management solutions were incapable of monitoring, analyzing, and troubleshooting issues in all of the new environments. Recognizing that they were effectively blind and knowing the success of their projects would depend on quality application service delivery to their end users, the IT team initiated a search for a single solution to provide visibility throughout their transforming enterprise.

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

The centralized State government information technology (IT) organization faced everyday challenges of managing their large-scale, complex government service delivery environment. Now, IT leadership faced additional cybersecurity and network demands, including those described in the subsections that follow. They had to support Federal Cybersecurity Program Requirements and sustain hybrid workforce operations and user experience. They also had to enhance security operations intelligence into new data center operations.

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

The agency was facing challenges as they made changes to their network and application strategies. One priority was to find ways to reduce Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK) in a manner that minimized the time his team spent troubleshooting, while also decreasing finger-pointing instances between IT teams. The agency had to focus on new organizational demands brought about by the COVID pandemic. Business continuity issues were spotlighted, as executives, managers, and business level staff (finance / accounting) shifted to a work-from-home model. Some of the unanticipated issues that emerged included executives and managers working from home offices and at the hospitals began experiencing business continuity issues impacting critical meetings using collaboration tools, Remote Workers using VPN services were reporting poor response time performance, intermittent issues with audio and video quality, and dropped VPN sessions, all of which were impacting their ability to do their jobs.

The airline moved from a legacy reservation system traversing its internal network to a fully integrated global, complex hybrid system. The multiple applications include loyalty membership, passenger reservations, flight closures, and more - all flowing between Equinix data centers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud environments, as well as SaaS providers located all over the world. In this architecture, AWS is the “”middleware” that links all of the information and transactional flows together. One of the unique aspects of this complex architecture is that their main airline reservation system runs in a Lambda serverless environment within AWS, which meant the airline lacked visibility to verify availability and performance of their applications.

The healthcare organization was undergoing a strategic building initiative that would result in an expansion of their main hospital campus, as well as the addition of patient and research facilities staffed by more than 5,000 doctors, nurses, research associates, scientists, and essential staff. The organization heavily relies on their network and application resources for swift access to patient, diagnostic, and research information, as well as voice and video communications throughout their sprawling state-wide environment. A steady, well-planned IT strategy to gain benefits from digital transformation has helped them achieve research milestones and patient treatment successes. However, maintaining the health, availability, and performance of these services is essential to the healthcare which was a primary driver behind the broad implementation of NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE® Service Assurance solution for monitoring and troubleshooting issues enterprise-wide.

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