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

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

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

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

Banco Votorantim, a major commercial bank in Brazil, operates a complex enterprise network to support their locations in Brazil and internationally. The bank's customers interact with it at branch locations, electronically with web services, and on the phone with their call centers. The bank had implemented a tool to help troubleshoot network problems several years previously, however, as Banco Votorantim had continued to grow their customer base and added more Brazilian and international locations, the IT operations team realized they needed more than that tool could provide. They needed more visibility into their voice and data application services across the network for in-depth, real-time analysis, views and reports that could be used by any of the members of their IT team.

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

The manufacturer was undergoing a significant digital transformation, migrating parts of its legacy hybrid environment to colocation facilities to support faster, more localized connectivity and larger cloud workloads. They also sought to reduce costs, increase security, and prepare for future modernizations. The migration to co-lo facilities quickly became a blind spot in their visibility strategy. To minimize and avoid disruptions, the project required pervasive visibility and instrumentation before, during, and after the migration for inbound and outbound traffic at the private cloud, at the co-lo edge, and at regional offices where users sit.

The manufacturer was facing visibility gaps in identifying the root cause of SaaS/UCaaS quality performance issues. The Network Operations (NetOps) team was challenged by a lack of visibility to effectively identify slowdowns, troubleshoot degradations, and restore quality delivery quickly in their efforts to avoid negative user impact. The company was also experiencing notable performance issues with UCaaS applications, without a clear understanding of the origin of the slowdowns. Readily available, ongoing visibility at the WAN network edge became necessary to pinpoint the source of degradations and swiftly resolve disruptions.

Forte Data Solutions recently faced a severe cybersecurity challenge. Their corporate WordPress website fell victim to the infamous Pharma Hack twice, compromising their online presence and potentially damaging their brand reputation. Forte discovered they have been hacked when a customer notified them that a popular search engine was directing them to a website that sold questionable pharmaceuticals. Unable to obtain diagnostic information from their current web hosting provider, Forte decided to take matters into their own hands by repairing the compromised WordPress configuration and, self-hosting their website in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. To further safeguard their website and maintain a robust cybersecurity posture, Forte chose NETSCOUT Omnis Cyber Intelligence (OCI) as their monitoring solution. Forte needed a solution that would not require refactoring current and future corporate website implementation and infrastructure. In addition, they were seeking a solution that could offer real-time monitoring and threat detection, with the ability to not only react to threats, but also become proactive by utilizing threat intelligence to anticipate potential attacks.

The regional healthcare organization was struggling with an overload of alerts from various security tools, making coordination difficult and error-prone. The Mean-Time-to-Resolution (MTTR) was significantly higher than desired, sometimes reaching multiple weeks. The security operation center (SOC) analysts were constantly switching between security tools, spending too much time bouncing back and forth rather than quickly finding Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) to stop attacks. Coordination between the various security tools was poor and sometimes nonexistent. All these tools had excellent GUIs, but they were designed only to provide functional value within their own cybersecurity feature set and did not share data with context. What was needed was a way to quickly correlate data across multiple tools.

The insurance group was implementing a multi-year phased strategy to replace data centers with more cost-effective, easier-to-scale colocation facilities. This was to ensure contact center agents and claims support specialists have reliable access to the applications necessary for delivering high-quality insurance services to policyholders and to support WFH initiatives to provide employees with reliable connectivity to the digital resources they need. However, as these migrations occurred, visibility became a very real challenge. Their IT organization quickly recognized that they had begun to lose awareness of network infrastructure and application service performance. If problems arose in the future, they may be unable to troubleshoot in the new areas.

The biopharmaceutical company faced several challenges. They needed to increase visibility and network interconnectivity to support strategic mergers and acquisitions. They also aimed to consolidate tools and integrate operational processes of the network and security teams by implementing a holistic strategy to monitor performance under one vendor. The company also needed to provide the network and security teams with recommendations for additional instrumentation based on NetFlow analysis and identified gaps in packet-capture. They also had to manage additional instrumentation at co-los, regional offices, and new manufacturing sites as the business expands and the need for performance management visibility increases. Lastly, they had to support the migration of specific in-house applications to the cloud by monitoring traffic and analyzing packets before, during, and after the transition, and adapt reporting processes to meet strict compliance regulations in various geographic regions.

The company had embarked on an aggressive digital transformation plan to migrate most if not all of their services in the cloud. Thousands of applications were in use to support their many product lines, manufacturing, and sales operations. Quality of experience was extremely important for employee productivity and customer service. For the last few years, their legacy environment had leveraged nGenius Enterprise Performance Management visibility for real-time network and application performance monitoring, management, and reporting. Countless times it had proven valuable in identifying the source of degradations - quickly avoiding broad disruptions that could negatively impact customers and employees. The plan developed for their future environment included migrating many corporate applications to AWS Cloud, moving network access closer to employees in their territories by implementing Equinix colocation data centers hosting VPN services, adopting several new software as a service (SaaS) applications, including Microsoft Office 365 and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) applications like MS Teams, and upgrading to SD-WAN at their remote offices and factories around the world to improve connectivity.

The manufacturer had been an early adopter of software-defined wide area networking (SDWAN) technology, having transitioned from Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) to SD-WAN over three years earlier. During subsequent years, SD-WAN technology improved, and the manufacturer’s needs evolved, requiring an update to suit current and future requirements, as well as new and evolving IT landscapes. Because business continuity is critical to company operations, their enterprise IT leaders and network operations (NetOps) team were committed to ensuring the best performance of their applications before, during, and after migration from one solution to another. The stakes were high, as downtime could cost manufacturers of this size millions of dollars per hour.

Nova DBA, a data services provider, faced a significant challenge when its clients experienced multiple cyber attacks on their corporate websites. The existing solution was unable to provide useful data for incident detection and response, leaving the company without real-time visibility to identify Indicators of Compromise (IoC) and understand the nature, source, or severity of the threat. The company's clients had experienced network-based events in their AWS infrastructure that caused network slowdowns and availability issues, raising concerns about the security of their critical applications and data. The cybersecurity team lacked visibility into the network attack vectors they were facing and had no tools or framework to detect, monitor, and classify these threats.

The energy company was planning to implement a private LTE (P-LTE) network to consolidate communication services, take advantage of LTE technology standardization, support key services, and leverage LTE radios that can propagate much longer distances than 5G mm wave radios. The company's internal IT team had been using the NETSCOUT nGenius solutions to manage network and application performance for its network services, including Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) among several services. The company's next major network transformation was to implement their own private LTE (Long-term evolution) network. The IT team decided to work with the NETSCOUT team to develop a migration strategy and performance monitoring plan to ensure the visibility for a successful transformation to their private LTE environment.

TaskUs, a provider of outsourced digital services and next-generation customer experience, faced challenges in managing access to a wide range of highly sensitive client data, including financial data, personally identifiable information (PII), and personal health information (PHI). The company also had to manage compliance with a broad range of global regulations and standards, including PCI DSS, GDPR, HITRUST, and SOC2, as well as custom contract requirements. TaskUs's rapid growth, with new applications going live weekly, added to the complexity of these challenges. The company needed to ensure that the information entrusted to it had the proper protection and was in compliance with regulations and client contracts, all without slowing down business for TaskUs or their customers.

Sauce Labs, a provider of a cloud-based platform for live, automated, and continuous testing of web & mobile applications, faced challenges in cloud data security. The company had to keep pace with business growth, acquisitions, and an explosion of customer data. Traditional methods of security were not sufficient as they did not focus on data. The company also faced a loss of visibility due to the mobility of data and the risk associated with managing customer data and data from integrations. Scoping data risk was another challenge as it was difficult to gauge the scope of data management risk, especially with acquisitions and business growth.

HealthSnap, a provider of a remote health services platform, was facing challenges in automating data security in the context of HITRUST. The company needed a constant pulse on its infrastructure and the data therein, including both asset inventories and infrastructure diagrams. This required regular, manual work to prove to regulators, partners, and patients that they knew what data they had, where it was, and that it was protected. The company also needed to put proper security controls in place and show how they were enforcing them. The speed of change for both the cloud infrastructure and the data was fast, making it difficult to satisfy these requirements. The company was also concerned about overworking its team and was looking for ways to quickly and effectively scale their throughput with automation.

Apiture migrated to the cloud for improved service delivery speed and quality, but this move presented a challenge for CISO Sean Darragh. He needed to maintain his ability to protect data from attacks and compliance risks. However, the rate and variety at which infrastructure (IaC) and data change in the cloud meant that legacy, non-native, DLP, and governance tools could not keep pace. This reduced visibility rippled throughout SecOps, reducing the confidence in their overall security posture. The security gaps created and accentuated by the cloud set Sean on a search for an automated, data-centric approach to security to solve three problems: Restoring visibility with automated asset discovery and data classification, streamlining risk assessment, detection, and response, and using data insights to define and drive support for proactive defense hardening.

Vip mobile, a Serbian mobile network operator, was in need of a monitoring solution that could effectively oversee all layers of their IT infrastructure. This included network equipment, SAN storage, servers, backup systems, databases, operating systems, and web services. The company had approximately 550 devices split over two data centers in Serbia. Their existing tool did not provide appropriate oversight of their IT estate, or meet their goals of monitoring all their applications and business services. The initial goal of Vip mobile’s monitoring project was to implement a solution to completely monitor their entire internal IT infrastructure.

Plusnet, a leading Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the UK, was facing challenges with their existing monitoring system based on Nagios® Core. The system, which was developed in-house, was not being actively maintained due to the complexity involved in making configuration changes. Additionally, there was a need to extend monitoring to cover their entire network. The existing system was not efficient and did not provide comprehensive coverage of Plusnet’s data centers.

Reach PLC, one of the UK's largest newspaper publishers, had several installations monitoring their network. However, they wanted to unify these into a single coherent system. They needed functionalities such as a single master view of systems with multiple collectors located across datacenters, easier management of monitoring system configuration, and long term storage of historical trend data. The challenge was to find a solution that could deliver these functionalities while improving the efficiency of the operations team and enhancing the service level of their operations.

Dimension Data Luxembourg, an IT services provider, was faced with the challenge of ensuring all services were running well 24/7 and that they were meeting customers’ service level agreements. As they moved to an IT-as-a-Service model, customers also expected increased transparency. The company needed a tool that offered streamlined, real-time monitoring. The solution also needed to provide a snapshot of all areas of the IT environment being used by the customer – not looking just at how each component, such as a server or switch, performs but also at how overall service is being delivered.

Trinity Mirror, one of the UK’s largest publishers, had several Nagios® Core installations monitoring their network. However, they wanted to unify these into a single coherent system. The complexity was added when they wanted to implement functionalities such as a single master view of systems with multiple collectors located across data centers, easier management of monitoring system configuration, and long-term storage of historical trend data. The existing system was fragmented and managing it was becoming increasingly challenging and time-consuming.

Atomic Data, a Managed Service Provider, was facing issues related to scalability, customization, and support. As the company grew, they had to re-configure an on-premise physical appliance or establish a VPN from a third-party to their remote environments. This was continuously adding elements of compliance risk and complexity to setting up new sites and changing established configurations. User interfaces were also not designed for easy hierarchical or tag-based management, turning main screens into dizzying messes during multi-customer events. Managing the diversity in Atomic Data’s monitored locations and customizations needed for complete monitoring was also challenging. All existing systems provided host templates that were difficult to change globally and made tracking and reporting on custom thresholds a chore. Writing custom checks couldn’t even be considered, since there was no interface and new checks would take weeks for their previous monitoring company to integrate into their release cycle.

Aurubis AG, the leading integrated copper group and the world’s largest copper recycler, needed a central, company-wide monitoring system for all subsidiaries that allowed for a standardized analysis of reported data and presentation of KPIs. All IT operations at Aurubis are based on various key performance indicators. These KPIs allow them not only to evaluate and control IT’s performance, but also to continually adjust IT operations to the needs of the company. Moreover, they form the basis for the evaluation and documentation of their suppliers’ target completion as well as their IT staff’s performance-related pay for internal services.

Evenbase, the team behind jobsite.co.uk, was facing challenges with their IT infrastructure. With candidates accessing vital information via Evenbase’s online tools, the IT team was under constant pressure to ensure their entire infrastructure was functioning correctly. They had been dealing with downtime and unnecessary alerts to their on-call team, so Evenbase required a product which could also collaborate with their existing Orion NPM system. They needed a monitoring tool that could provide them with the scope to monitor their entire IT estate while providing an in-depth, single view capability.

Stadtwerke Speyer GmbH is a utility provider based in the town of Speyer, Germany. With over 30,000 customers and 250 staff, the company has always maintained a large, complex IT infrastructure to support the delivery of gas, electricity, and water. Increasing market liberalization of the energy sector in Germany has encouraged many utility companies to diversify their product portfolio to remain competitive. Following this trend, Stadtwerke Speyer is using the extra capacity in its IT infrastructure to offer managed server and application hosting services to local SMBs. The company’s IT infrastructure is spread across two data centers, one production and one backup. The company uses a mixture of Windows and Linux operating systems running a variety of application stacks, storage devices, switches, and environmental systems. The company’s core challenge is maintaining the high levels of complex electronic data exchange with other utility providers.

UKCloud, a specialist multi-cloud provider, was facing challenges with its traditional IT monitoring platform. The platform was no longer providing the value or service required and was at risk of missing critical incidents and outages. The CloudOps team was forced to spend more and more time writing scripts to support its evolving technology choices and rapidly scaling platform, essentially building a bespoke monitoring service. They needed a technology partner who could provide effective IT infrastructure monitoring and automated alerting, covering a very diverse range of digital environments, so that UKCloud could identify and resolve issues before any downtime or customer impacting issues occurred. They also required a multi-tenanted, on-premises solution that could be run in their secure datacentres, backed by local, security cleared personnel.