NETSCOUT > Case Studies > Gaming Leader’s Cloud, Virtualization Investments Pay Off With NETSCOUT Service Edge Visibility

Gaming Leader’s Cloud, Virtualization Investments Pay Off With NETSCOUT Service Edge Visibility

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
NETSCOUT® Certified InfiniStreamNG® (ISNG) software appliance
vSTREAM® virtual appliances
nGenius® Packet Flow Operating System software for Certified 5000 Series Packet Broker

Tech Stack

Cisco switching
Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Office 365
VMware virtual service environments

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

The customer is a hotel and gaming company that has emerged from the health & safety challenges that limited client visits to their casino floors to again generate millions in quarterly profits. This financial rebound, in part, led to related plans to expand the company’s hospitality footprint and gaming operations. As the company increased their profits, leadership continued transforming technology operations to enhance performance precision and security across their hotel and casino operations, including expanded investments in Cisco switching, multi-cloud (e.g., Amazon Web Services hosting certain gaming applications), Software as a Service (SaaS) (e.g., Microsoft Office 365), Co-located Data Center (Co-lo), and VMware virtual service environments. The casino’s operating environment also includes vendor solutions that centralize visualization, monitoring, and control of the gaming and slot machine technologies operating on the casino floor.

The Challenge

The hotel and gaming company was facing issues with their video slot machine performance. The IT Operations team was unable to resolve these issues with the installed vendor tool. The lack of cloud, virtual, and data center service edge visibility hindered real-time monitoring and troubleshooting efficiencies. The company's network performance monitoring tool failed to identify the issue, only suggesting a possible problem in their Cisco switch environment. This led to unproductive communications with Cisco, as their network switches were not at issue. The company needed quicker visualization and analysis to return gaming operations to customer-expected levels.

The Solution

The company deployed the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, which provided real-time performance snapshots needed by IT Operations to visualize gaming operations and hospitality service processing in their increasingly complex, multi-vendor technology environment. They also installed software-based InfiniStreamNG® (ISNG) appliance technology in their on-premises data center. This smart data source used patented Adaptive Service Intelligence® (ASI) technology to generate real-time metadata from the company’s network packet traffic as a source for nGeniusONE performance analysis, reporting, troubleshooting, and forensic support. vSTREAM virtual smart data appliances were used to provide economic, flexible visibility in AWS Cloud, Co-lo, Office 365, VMware, virtual private network gateway, and on-premises data center environments. NETSCOUT Packet Flow Operating System software for Certified PFS 5010 appliance was installed in the data center to improve traffic load balancing and overall network performance by forwarding packet traffic to the ISNG appliance and other third-party tools used by IT Operations.

Operational Impact

The NETSCOUT smart visibility solution closed service edge blind spots across their cloud, data center, Co-lo, and virtual service environments.
IT Operations accessed a real-time nGeniusONE performance snapshot of all essential gaming applications in their casino operations, as well as the key service enablers supporting this environment.
They quickly used an nGeniusONE single-pane-of-glass Service Dashboard view to determine this issue was not related to the network or Cisco switches at all, but instead the result of a misconfiguration issue in their third-party video gaming management environment.
By making a corresponding configuration change in the third-party gaming management controller environment, IT Operations quickly returned bettors to their favorite video game and slot machine experiences.

Quantitative Benefit