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 company’s focus on maintaining a leading marketplace position means information technology (IT) leadership is laser-focused on continually evaluating internal and external business delivery capabilities and expenses, while exploring innovative options to reduce technology complexity. As part of that effort, two years ago, the BPO had established a new U.S. data center and commenced migrating existing customer services and establishing new client delivery platforms at this facility. At the same, the IT resources tasked with managing customer-facing virtual and network services delivery to customers were reporting visibility limitations associated with the installed aggregation switch and network taps. Specifically, IT teams were having issues assuring virtual and network technology performance due to their inability to see any packet traffic flowing from the aggregation switches from network taps, which were also supplied by a legacy vendor. For an IT organization focused on continually reducing complexity, the aggregation switch technology and network taps performance issues had become problematic.

The U.S. State’s information technology (IT) team was facing increasing network performance demands and instances of dropped packets that were causing data retransmissions, application delays, and network latency. They decided to centralize their data center operations down to two facilities and simultaneously transition to 40G network speeds. These strategic changes promised to result in better service delivery for agencies, employees, and constituents, as well as faster network responsiveness and reduced operating expenses (OpEx) via improved IT efficiencies. However, the transition required consolidating data center servers and collapsing the existing distributed network. The 40GB network would also require next-generation data sources and packet broker technology to support increased speeds. As part of the technology modernization component, IT was rolling out a VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment and implementing a new Avaya Voice over IP (VoIP) environment.

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.

A large wireless service provider was faced with decreased Net Promoter Score (NPS) due to frequent network issues. This was affecting customer loyalty and internal sales incentives. The challenge was to isolate the chronic network issues and increase the NPS.

The insurance company was transitioning hosting of certain applications to a Microsoft Azure cloud platform. However, the Network Operations team discovered they had neither the required visibility into this new cloud environment, nor the means to effectively monitor it. This was of significant organizational concern, as Azure was going to be used to host some Web-based apps. The IT team’s issues with Azure were compounded by other longer-standing visibility gaps in the company’s network traffic, as well as application responsiveness concerns. Those gaps made it difficult for IT to establish functional baselines for application and network performance.

The large African mobile operator was facing a significant challenge due to the exponential growth of network traffic. The operator was experiencing frequent loss of data, which was having a substantial impact on network performance and service assurance. The operator anticipated that the subscribers’ data would double each year, which would further exacerbate the problem. The existing infrastructure was approaching capacity and there were constant interruptions on service assurance continuity. The operator needed an open platform software-based monitoring solution to support Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud based services.

The Carrier Service Provider (CSP) had been leading as the number one in quality for five years in a highly competitive region. However, a series of national outages threatened their number one position and customer loyalty. The CSP was in a race against time to prove its position, protect brand reputation, and keep loyal customers. The challenge was further complicated by the dispersed global teams of decision makers and millions of euros at stake.

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 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.

The rural telephone company offering wireless services was facing a significant challenge. Their field technicians were located more than a four-hour drive from their offices in any direction when dispatched to collect data. This resulted in the company spending thousands of dollars each month on drive testing. Despite this, the engineers did not feel they were getting the data they needed to make accurate decisions. The drive testing was not only expensive but also time-consuming. Depending on network loading and user activity, it could also be non-repeatable and fail to detect the customers’ problems.

The software company had been a customer of NETSCOUT’s for more than five years and had come to depend on the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for performance monitoring and analysis of key business services in their private data centers. Availability and performance of their software services are cornerstones of their success. With NETSCOUT, they were able to identify issues early and reduce the time it took to pinpoint the cause, enabling rapid resolution of issues, oftentimes before customers were impacted. Like many modern enterprises today, this software company’s Director of Network and Cloud services had two primary concerns when it came to constant availability and performance of their applications for customers, employees and partners: Service Assurance and Security! The IT staff was motivated to avoid or quickly address anything that might impede users from accessing on-line services, regardless of whether it was related to a performance problem or a denial of service (DDoS) issue. Given several recent data center and infrastructure changes, combined with plans for moving some of their services to VMware and to the cloud, the IT team initiated steps to ensure that they had visibility throughout their environment to protect against both service assurance and security disruptions.

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 facing several challenges. Firstly, the new data center configuration required end-to-end visibility. Secondly, the recently launched, high-profile digital applications were experiencing occasional slow performance and outage issues, impacting business and public perception of those new apps. Lastly, the contact center voice performance troubleshooting was focused on recreating issues rather than proactive monitoring. The insurer was also experiencing strategic and tactical IT service delivery concerns, with associated service assurance requirements that were frustrating the Network Operations and Telecom teams.

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 healthcare organization was embarking on a multi-million-dollar rollout of a new electronic health record (EHR) management system. The IT team was tasked with ensuring a flawless introduction of the new system. They designed a comprehensive network readiness program, which included upgrading the service assurance platform to monitor and triage network performance issues. This required achieving deep packet visibility, so everything would be visible on the network. The IT leadership needed to be confident that any visibility solution would deliver true copies of the traffic to the monitoring tools, to guarantee a seamless rollout of the new EHR application.

The company was undergoing a digital transformation to improve business operations efficiency. This included a shift in real estate plans with new data centers opening and older ones closing. These migrations involved new locations, a mix of company-owned and third-party facilities, and coordination with service providers contracted to manage some data center operations. The company also wanted to transition to next-generation 40GB network speeds to better support new digital platforms, next-generation security tools, and the company’s users. Additionally, the company was transitioning certain business applications and services to a hybrid Cloud environment that included both Amazon Web Services and private Cloud platforms. The Network Engineering and Security teams needed to monitor and assure that service quality and data security were not adversely impacted by Cloud migrations.

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 company's business success is linked to the high-quality Contact Center and innovative technology solutions delivered to customers. They operate numerous data centers across the country to maintain cloud-based Contact Center services for a growing customer base. Their IT team takes no shortcuts in meeting customer service level agreements (SLAs), including assuring high quality by recording each and every Voice over IP (VoIP) line for their cloud-based customers. Their commitment to quality has further driven the company to establish redundant contact centers. As a result, IT is managing multiple data center locations running redundant aggregation switches and network taps to assure that network and voice traffic is visible and accessible for performance monitoring and troubleshooting. However, issues had emerged with the legacy deployment that was causing packet drops between the network and the monitoring tools – which was unacceptable. For alerting and troubleshooting effectiveness, every packet needed to be received by the monitoring devices.