NETSCOUT > Case Studies > Global Car Rental Company Assures Performance of Leading Digital Service Platform with NETSCOUT

Global Car Rental Company Assures Performance of Leading Digital Service Platform with NETSCOUT

Company Size

1,000+

Country

United States
Worldwide

Product

nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform
InfiniStream Appliances
nGenius Packet Flow Switches

Tech Stack

Web Services
Virtual Environments
Load Balancers

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Revenue Growth

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Automotive
Transportation

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Root Cause Analysis & Diagnosis

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

This internationally recognized car rental company is an icon in the travel and transportation industry. As one of the largest providers in its industry with thousands of offices in nearly 100 countries, and services available online through countless third-party travel and leisure sites, the company offers critically important car rental services to the travelling public. The company’s web services rely on its network and applications to provide availability and pricing to customers around the world.

The Challenge

The car rental company's revenues are primarily driven by web bookings and sales, which are derived from partnerships with third-party travel and leisure sites that provide rates, availability and reservations to retail customers. The challenge faced by IT is that if the third-party travel and leisure sites don’t see quotes within 1.5 seconds, the company loses its ability to bid for customer business - losing out on bookings and revenue. The application environment is highly complex requiring multiple systems to work efficiently. For example, in order to respond to customer queries and provide accurate pricing information, the web application performs multiple database lookups to search inventory and determine the right pricing based on availability. Unfortunately, the transactions were taking too long to process. Further complicating the matter, the application performance was degraded after IT migrated from physical servers to virtual environments. The network operations team was unable to quickly determine the root cause of the outages, making it difficult to resolve. With the potential for poor partner support, poor customer experience, and ultimately, lost revenue, response time degradations were having a very real impact on the company’s bottom line.

The Solution

IT turned to NETSCOUT to help uncover the source of the network delays. With the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, combined with InfiniStream appliances for analysis across the service delivery path. Further, they architected the nGenius packet flow switches to deliver network traffic visibility from strategic points in the environment to the InfiniStream appliances and other tools from the frontend servers and load balancers to the back-end database servers. This enabled IT to rapidly pinpoint the root cause of the performance issues. Using intelligence provided by nGeniusONE’s analysis technology, IT was able to determine that the load balancers were responsible for the increased latency. Further investigation revealed that the load balancer slowness was due to a recent patch. In addition, the virtual server environment was found to be responsible for added latency, causing applications to timeout and abandon transactions. The nGeniusONE platform discovered issues missed by synthetic transactions that only looked for server availability. nGeniusONE looks deep inside the virtual environment and analyzes the status of the application and its response time performance. By identifying issues within the virtual server environment, server teams were able to resolve the latency issues that were causing the lengthy delays.

Operational Impact

The nGeniusONE solution was able to uncover the issues responsible for the latency within just a few mouse clicks, allowing IT to respond quickly and dramatically reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).
The network team is now proactive in managing application response times on inquiries, ensuring less than 1.5 seconds to respond with answers to queries, as is required by SLAs with third-party web partners.
Further, nGeniusONE enables the IT teams to keep servers from becoming overloaded, thus minimizing business risk.
IT relies on nGeniusONE service dashboards and alarming capabilities to get in front of issues before they become severe problems.
The NETSCOUT solution facilitates improved collaboration across different IT stakeholders, such as server, network, and application operations, increasing the speed and efficiently of triage efforts.

Quantitative Benefit