Government agencies in both U.S. and Canada are looking to transform legacy EMS delivery technology to better accommodate today’s mobile, text, imaging, video, and data platforms. As a result, some state, provincial, and local first-responder agencies are rethinking how to better deliver EMS support to residents, including outsourcing technology services to leading thirdparty providers. That is where this leading Call Center company used lessons learned in their other business lines to improve voice and data delivery network support capabilities for police, f ire, and EMT teams. With the high stakes involved in delivering EMS Call Center solutions, the company was committed to offering network carrier-grade voice and data support to help customers improve service delivery. The EMS Call Center would also offer agency customers and their f irst responders a voice over IP (VoIP) switch solution to replace existing telephone exchanges, multimedia call processing and a unified call flow, with intelligent call routing based on employee skill sets and a customizable user interface.

The National Tax Agency was facing challenges in delivering government financial processing services on a national scale. The agency had outsourced operations of numerous vendor technology platforms to a trusted managed service provider (MSP), including voice and Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) solutions operating at 10 government locations and numerous Contact Centers supporting the public. The MSP team used several vendor solutions to help monitor Contact Center service performance, and when they reviewed the application performance monitoring (APM) tool they had been using to assure UC technology, they saw problematic shortcomings. These included limited UC performance metrics for Cisco voice, video, and collaboration services, a lack of visibility into the network as an important element of overall UC performance, an inability to visualize and monitor agency traffic in cloud environments, and lack of visibility into east-west network traffic within the agency’s internal environment.

The global manufacturing company was facing challenges with the quality and performance of voice services through their Contact Centers, including during the migration to SIP trunking technologies. They lacked visibility to identify the source of problems with QoS across their complex environment. The IT department had inherited responsibility for all IT monitoring in North and South America, which led to specific issues monitoring VoIP. They were already experiencing call issues because QoS tagging was inconsistent across different regions, and IT lacked the visibility necessary to identify where the changes originated. They used multiple tools for Voice monitoring, which required resource-intensive, time-consuming research, that in turn, led to unacceptably long times to troubleshoot issues.

The company, a Fortune 500 technology manufacturer and services provider, was facing intermittent issues impacting their SaaS collaboration services. They wanted to ensure these issues were addressed in their earliest stages of development to assure their customers received the same flawless, high-quality experience they had come to enjoy from this popular provider. These challenges were further complicated by the very nature of the service – at times, there could be hundreds of thousands of simultaneous call volumes; 40 GB high- speed links; a variety of different voice, video and data applications; and the need to monitor and analyze not just the call set-up protocols, but also the media traffic and call quality metrics.

The company's call center agents began experiencing issues with dropped voice calls, resulting in customer service exchanges being interrupted before completion. Regardless of call status, telephone call lengths were varying from agent to agent, with customer exchanges abruptly dropping after 30 minutes. In addition to dealing with customer service issues and frustrated call center agents unable to perform their duties as a result of the dropped calls, the company was unable to consistently meet negotiated Service Level Agreement thresholds regarding voice performance for the companies they were contracted to serve. Existing third-party tools being employed by the IT team were unable to view the call flow architecture in a manner required for successful troubleshooting.

The North American Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) was facing challenges in improving visibility from their data center hub into DMV branch and user operations. The underlying network, application, and voice environment needed to run optimally to avoid delays that could result in longer lines, frustrated customers, and adverse publicity. The IT team was also facing the challenge of implementing and maintaining Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) and Microsoft Office 365 technology rollouts without a service assurance technology solution approach.

The financial institution was facing a high volume of sophisticated security threats daily. As part of their disaster recovery strategy, they needed to migrate their datacenter to a less risky region due to potential earthquakes. Their previous network detection and response solution, which was over 4 years old, was not meeting their business needs in terms of functionality, scalability, and customer service. This led them to seek a replacement solution that could provide deep packet inspection with the best functionality, scale with their growth, and integrate with their current security stack, specifically Palo Alto Networks.

The agency has split the hosting of their well-known business and custom agency applications between their private data center and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Employees, wherever they are located, are connecting to the applications via the closest Equinix co-location (co-lo) facility where the agency has deployed mostly access technology, including Internet Switch links (ISLs) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) gateways. From the co-los, employee traffic is sent to the location where the application in use is hosted. Some software as a service applications (SaaS) are also in use, such as Salesforce.com. This complex, hybrid cloud environment supports significant agency business for the public’s benefit and safety. Constant availability and consistent performance, for all users, accessing from anywhere, through any of the co-los, to any application was the challenge for the NetOps team.

The government agency was in the process of building out their Security Operations Center (SOC) and wanted to leverage any existing technologies they had for security purposes. They had previously purchased a small order of OCI Cyber Adaptors for visibility into their 2 main datacenters that were on opposite sides of the country. The primary use by the SOC team for Omnis Cyber Intelligence was a packet capture and retrieval function related to an incident identified in their Splunk, Security information and event management (SIEM) platform. During initial product training of their first purchase, they learned more about their current infrastructure and the visibility gaps that existed, so they purchased more cyber adaptors to fill those gaps.

The global retailer was undergoing a digital transformation that included the introduction of a “centralized performance hub” concept for maintaining the health of their network, applications, and end-users’ experience. This data center transformation was to supersede the highly distributed model currently in place for both networking technology and monitoring infrastructure. In addition to improving monitoring visibility into their global application services, the IT team was expected to achieve certain CAPEX and OPEX savings as well. By concentrating resources such as monitoring tools, switches, and human expertise into larger regional facilities, the retailer could consolidate data services for HQ, distribution centers, and stores. Call quality was critical for this retailer to ensure that communications between buyers, distribution centers, and retail stores, as well as calls in the customer contact centers, were seamless and problem-free.

The pharmaceutical company was planning a global rollout of Microsoft Teams, including Contact Center operations. However, they faced visibility gaps in identifying early MS Teams voice quality issues, particularly in the Executive Suite. The company's application- and PC-based telephony services would be run on MS Teams. The transition was designed to minimize impact to on-site business operations at corporate locations involved in this desktop voice migration to MS Teams. The company also had a 99.999% uptime service level agreement (SLA) with Microsoft to assure high-quality MS Teams performance. After the first phase of the MS Teams transition, IT Operations experienced an unexpected uptick in IT trouble tickets from the company executives due to voice quality performance issues.

The company was looking to deliver a superior quality of experience for customers interacting with the representatives in the contact center. This would require enhanced visibility in their data centers and contact centers to ensure network, voice, application, and end-user experience performance assurance, as well as to reduce the time to troubleshoot issues when they did occur. With customer service agents due to return to their offices following home-based work during the pandemic, the IT staff was motivated to implement their new visibility.

The retailer faced a visibility gap in some core segments in their data centers which had been upgraded to support high-speed traffic. They also wanted to reduce costs and vendor and tool clutter in their monitoring ecosystem. The retailer's IT staff during the pandemic was to evaluate the current state of their monitoring tools, consolidate for efficiencies in cost and operation where possible, and ensure gaps in visibility were addressed to maintain quality customer experience, both in store and online.

The pandemic’s arrival marked the start of increased complexity in the company’s client, network, data center, and cloud service edge environments. Shortly after COVID-19’s emergence and the company’s expansion of virtual private network (VPN) services to support thousands of employees moving to work-from-home (WFH) environments, IT Operations conferred with their NETSCOUT PSE resources about maximizing the use of nGeniusONE and nGeniusPULSE to better inform their investigation and resolution decisionmaking. That effort quickly resulted in IT Operations using VPN split-tunneling to ease WFH users’ access to UC&C services directly over the Internet. Longer-term, IT Operations’ remediation approach involved establishing nearly 20 VPN access points and Palo Alto Network (PAN) f irewall services in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud resources. That approach seemed to address their remote network bandwidth issues quickly and securely, but it also revealed a gap in how well IT Operations could visualize VPN and firewall services were performing in AWS. Performance over these network service edges in the AWS environment was critical to WFH employees’ success. With only NetFlow and MIB2 data available to them, IT Operations struggled to make sense of the discrepancies between the disparate, siloed data sources. Further, IT Operations was losing visibility into performance at one remote site due to blind spots in the traffic traversing from their wide area network (WAN) into AWS.

The company was facing a high-profile migration to a new ERP system. Service degradations impacting employees and customers were taking too long to resolve due to lack of proactive, in-depth visibility for network and application troubleshooting. Server monitoring tools used in the past had been found to be completely reactive, used only after employees or customers had already notified IT that problems existed. Senior leadership identified excessive problem resolution time as a major disruption, effecting both internal users and external customers. It was simply taking far too long to rectify issues without meaningful visibility.

The financial services company faced a challenge of engaging in introductory-level consultations with millions of potential investors. The company decided to upgrade their Avaya gateways supporting voice and video communications and move them to a VMware NSX-T environment. However, the vendor tools they were assessing for providing real-time views into, and quality assessments of the voice communications traffic traversing their environment, revealed shortcomings in visualizing voice performance metrics in the Avaya virtual gateway environment and providing the scalability to support the large-scale deployment.

The government agency was migrating their private data centers to Equinix Co-locations. For years, the agency has depended on their nGeniusONE solution with InfiniStreamNG appliances to monitor, analyze, trend, and report on performance of the network and the applications used by their supporting agencies. This has enabled them to proactively alert on developing issues, troubleshoot problems, and plan for upgrades and changes throughout their private data center to ensure quality of experience for the agencies’ employees and citizens. The IT staff required this same level of monitoring capability in the Equinix Colos to continue this quality delivery of services. To avoid a gap in visibility, the network engineering team resourced their local NETSCOUT sales team to evaluate the planned migration and create an implementation design to ensure detailed network and application performance analysis would be available for their strategic service assurance activities.

The energy company was implementing a new, private LTE environment to support their digital transformations and critical communications services. They needed to assure quality delivery of services over the LTE environment as soon as the service is in production. Over the years, the cost to maintain these digital transformations has also increased to the point that IT and executive leadership concluded that implementing a private Long Term Evolution (LTE) environment will help improve the costs and quality of service necessary to run today’s and future technology advancements. The plan includes bringing the critical business services and power listed above, and more, into the new LTE infrastructure. The IT staff for this energy company recognized that they have held their WAN, Internet, and Cellular service providers to strict service level agreements over the years to ensure high-quality delivery of all their services.

The pharmaceutical company was facing challenges due to its expansion and workforce transition which led to hundreds of remote sites with limited IT visibility. The company was undergoing digital transformations amid a global hybrid workforce transition which was challenging daily IT operations and strategic project advancements. The Network Operations (NetOps) team was leading efforts to diversify and expand business technology platforms to keep pace with organizational growth. As a result, strategic planning had been commenced for Cloud-based services, Equinix Colocated Data Centers (Co-lo’s), VMware virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) projects in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions.

The financial organization was facing a challenge with their current network management tool which was not scaling well technically or financially when used to monitor a VMware NSX-T environment. The company had implemented a VMware NSX-T software defined network (SDN) design to meet the demands of their growing, successful banking operations. However, the network management tool used in their legacy data center could not scale well technically or financially to monitor the VMware NSX-T environment, which led the IT team to begin investigating other solutions. At the same time, security visibility was also a concern and was added to the list of use cases that the overall IT team hoped to address. Collaboration between the network and security operations teams resulted in a set of technical capabilities that would be used to evaluate potential monitoring solutions for the financial firm.

The government organization was involved in a new, private data center project that would be used to host all the applications and network connectivity necessary for employees and contractors to perform their strategic and tactical day-to-day operations and for citizens to interact with the agency. The challenge was simple - new network, new communications tools, new business applications – and it would require new visibility to assure quality delivery of the services. This IT staff represents one of the most experienced groups of professionals assembled and knows even the best designed and deployed network environment will have disruptions that will impact their applications and communications. It was part of their best-practices strategy to plan for this, so they could proactively mitigate that risk with proactive visibility, monitoring, and analysis.

The government agency was tasked with meeting national cybersecurity mandates and improving network, virtual, remote, and data center visibility and agency operations. The agency's Security Operations (SecOps) team had to reconsider their long-time Network Performance Management (NPM) strategy, which relied on vendor tools that used NetFlow, MIB-II, and SNMP as data sources for analysis, post-incident troubleshooting, and forensic security efforts. The operation of nGenius 5000 Series PFS appliances in the agency environment helped increase SecOps’ awareness of potentially expanding the use of packet-based data sources to improve their monitoring and troubleshooting activities.

The healthcare organization was expanding and implementing new web-based and cloud-based applications. This led to gaps in visibility, which was a challenge as the organization required monitoring visibility for efficient operation. The organization had previously implemented packet-based monitoring with the 9800 series ISNG appliances in the high-speed core of their network, with other ISNG appliances at some of their regional hospitals and medical buildings on the wide area network (WAN) edges. For end-user experience and client edge monitoring, they added nGeniusPULSE for synthetic test analysis from 3000 series nPoint devices that are implemented in some of these same hospital locations. However, as the organization continued to expand and implement transformative application services, they identified several gaps in visibility that they wanted to address with the extension of NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring.

The U.S.-based online mortgage broker embarked on a major Unified Communications (UC) project by migrating to a SIP trunking service. This upgrade was expected to save as much as $100,000 per month, while at the same time improving revenue opportunities by enabling outbound dialers to generate 16 times the number of calls with potential mortgage and refinance customers. However, following the implementation of the UC system, quality-of-service (QoS) issues, echo problems, switch issues resulting in dialing problems, and DNS/HTTP errors within the voice mail web app created a poor user experience. This jeopardized the success of the project and potentially harmed the business. IT faced the difficult challenge of proactively pinpointing the source of the problems, in order to rapidly triage and resolve them.

Throughout the COVID pandemic, use of university applications and networking services shifted a number of times in several ways, ranging from users being fully on campus, to some on campus and some off-site, to most accessing resources remotely. This created a variety of challenges for meeting the high-quality standards for responsiveness, availability, and reliability in performance of their services. Users required quality digital experience with their LMS application to turn in assignments and report grades; Microsoft Office 365 for email, collaboration, and content applications; and for voice and collaboration services, like MS Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and others. The IT team identified a gap in application-level visibility into these services that made it difficult to assure quality of experience and troubleshoot issues when they occurred. Additionally, they wanted to be able to work cooperatively, in an informed manner, with some of their third-party technology vendors delivering WAN and Internet access, cloud services, software as a service (SaaS) applications, voice, and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) applications.

The agency’s Network Operations (NetOps) team was tasked with assuring a successful data center operations technology refresh and migration to an on-premises environment. They had relied on NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution with InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances to monitor the agency’s existing network and application activity and knew from trended reports that the new data center was going to require an upgrade to high-speed links in their environment based on increased traffic volumes over time. This would also require that the nGenius Packet Flow Switches (PFSs) and ISNG appliances could monitor at the new network speeds to assure visibility as traffic transitioned to the new network and continue real-time monitoring after the migration. As part of ongoing agency data center transformation planning, NetOps had also identified a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) architecture as the next-generation solution best-suited to respond to their evolving network demands. In making the decision to move to Cisco ACI SDN, NetOps was motivated by potential reductions in cost, complexity, and IT overhead in managing performance across their distributed environment. Given the criticality of network performance to this agency’s mission success, NetOps had heightened concerns about outsourcing operations to any third party, particularly focusing on loss of IT control and security, as well as the need to realize performance that complied with the agency’s negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with contracted third parties.

The retailer faced a sudden shift to a predominantly e-commerce model due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in a doubling of daily website traffic and a significant increase in e-commerce business volumes. The company's IT operations were critical to this transition, but they faced several challenges. They were relying on a multi-vendor tool mix for monitoring applications and network services, which led to dropped packets and data loss due to increased traffic volumes. There were also emerging 'blind spots' that made real-time monitoring and troubleshooting difficult. These included database authentication problems, user-experience challenges with cloud-based Google Workspace collaboration services for remote employees, and outages in the data link network layer. The company was also trying to build out internal lab environments to test the impact of network performance associated with introducing new applications in the production environment, but this was delayed due to the lack of necessary views for this type of forecasting analysis.

The Network Operations team (NetOps) at the healthcare company wanted to expand their existing ISNG deployment but didn’t have the budget, so they approached the Security Operations team (SecOps) to show them the enhanced value of their packet-based solution vs. the NetFlow-based solution the security team was currently using. The SecOps team’s existing NetFlow-based platform was approaching end of life and required a significant investment to upgrade. With this issue, the SecOps team was interested but hesitant in a new platform, because they didn’t fully understand the capability of packet-derived data and preferred their existing NetFlow-based platform. The team used this platform on a daily basis, and that familiarity provided a lot of comfort to them. They believed this NetFlow-based solution was providing adequate information for them to be successful at identifying, investigating, and remediating threats. However, the team was open-minded throughout these conversations, coming to see the gaps in detail using NetFlow, such as identifying individual IP addresses using a particular protocol. They began to understand and value the different types of information that packet-based data would be able to provide.

The energy company's technology infrastructure for assuring high-quality utility service delivery to millions of their customers depended on a multi-tier, multi-vendor environment. This included in-house IT specialists, Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) resources, Microsoft Azure Cloud services, and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud solution. The company's workforce transition added to IT's increased reliance on multi-vendor solutions running in remote locations to assure employee access to critical business services. However, the IT team did not have end-through-end visibility and real-time analysis, which are essential for assuring 7x24 operations and successful troubleshooting when issues occur. As a result, the emergence of Help Desk tickets identifying user-reported issues with Office 365 business email access and MS Teams collaboration support services became problematic. The BPO's reluctance to provide packet captures (PCAPs) generated from the network traffic traversing the data center environment they managed on the company’s behalf further complicated these challenges.

The financial services company faced a series of project challenges, some of which coincided with business continuity and service delivery transitions necessitated by the pandemic. The IT projects were critical to sustaining high-quality service delivery to millions of investment clients. The company had developed new, digitally delivered products and services to better serve their clients remotely. These Web-based applications for wealth and asset management required enhanced visibility to support real-time IT monitoring. The company's global business growth led to associated demands on the networks supporting regional operations. The IT teams overseeing these regional projects subscribed to a phased approach to these multi-tier network expansions. The company's data center operations were expanding internationally to meet increased business service delivery requirements, and the IT team knew providing access to network resources closer to the users would reduce latency.