Large North American Power Company Turns to NETSCOUT for Network and Application Service Assurance
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- Canada
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform
- InfiniStream Appliances
- NetFlow Collectors
- OptiView
Tech Stack
- WAN/LAN
- Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
- Web-based services
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Energy Management System
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
The customer is a large North American power company that serves customers across nearly half of the U.S. states and parts of Canada. In addition to electricity and gas, they also provide many other integrated energy solutions to customers. They are committed to finding better ways to deliver safe, reliable energy to homes and businesses, along with creating a diverse infrastructure, including clean renewable energy. The company is taking advantage of digital transformation to improve the end-user experience, enhance network performance, cut costs, and provide continuous improvement across the business.
The Challenge
The power company was facing challenges with its existing monitoring and analysis equipment, which was outdated and not meeting the current needs of the large, distributed, complex environment. This left the IT support team blind to bandwidth constraints and unable to triage key services within the data center and between hundreds of remote sites. The company was in dire need of a technology refresh in order to effectively monitor WAN/ LAN links that were critical to power generation, distribution, and business applications, such as billing and other services. When remote links would go down or suffer performance degradations, payments could not be collected, which adversely impacted critically important revenue cycle management. In addition, IT was under pressure to assure the performance of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Web-based services that provide customers access to their smart meter usage data. Ensuring a good customer experience required quick response times for the network.
The Solution
To solve its network and application performance problems, the power company turned to NETSCOUT®. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform was selected to process data from both InfiniStream appliances and NetFlow Collectors to provide comprehensive analysis across the enterprise environment. In addition, OptiView® was employed at remote sites for troubleshooting and gathering addition data to investigate security incidents. The nGeniusONE solution consolidates information from all data sources and correlates packet data with NetFlow data providing full visibility into the performance of the infrastructure. nGeniusONE offers centralized management for critical services in remote and central sites. InfiniStream appliances were deployed in the larger, more critical locations while NetFlow Collectors were used as a cost-effective alternative for performance monitoring at the company’s smaller remote locations. The OptiView XG solution was selected for use at generation and distribution facilities to conduct quick plugins for triage of network and wireless components specifically within those facilities. This solution was deemed more effective at remote sites where InfiniStreams were not installed.
Operational Impact
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