NETSCOUT

CN, one of the largest railroads in North America, was facing application performance problems and response time delays in its IT network. The network supports over 22,000 employees who rely on it for various operations such as tracking shipments in real time, processing customer service transactions, fulfilling order requests, and ensuring the efficient and safe operation of the company’s extensive, automated rail system. The company uses a variety of NETSCOUT Intelligent Data Sources in combination with several nGenius analysis modules to monitor their wide area network (WAN) links and 1,800-1,900 Cisco switches and routers. However, they were unable to pinpoint the root cause of the performance issues they were experiencing.

The company was undergoing a transition to a Software-Defined Network (SDN) using a phased approach based on the recommended practices defined by their technology provider for this project, Cisco. The project involved the design of a next-generation leaf-and-spine architecture supporting 100GB network speeds, use of Cisco Equal-Cost Multi-path Routing (ECMP), and new VMware ESX virtual servers. The IT team knew they needed a technology-neutral partner to assist their efforts in closing any blind spots that surfaced in the transformed SDN environment, including both east-west and north-south traffic paths, providing 'over-time' trend analysis and reporting into business service performance before, during, and after the move to SDN, and ensuring business communications continuity and coordination across a multi-phase SDN implementation.

The healthcare provider was engaged in a major multi-year, multi-million dollar unified communications (UC) project. The IT team recognized that if the upgraded UC clusters were not fully tested under load, the system could be vulnerable to a range of failures, such as call drops and lack of dial-tone. Without real-time visibility and analysis in the production network, patient-impacting problems could persist far longer than would be acceptable. IT needed to verify and stress test the system in pre-production before go-live, to attain service assurance. A further goal was to put a solution in place that would allow IT to protect the performance of the new VoIP services post-deployment in the actual production environment. This solution would have to enable IT to proactively get ahead of issues before they impacted patients. At the same time, IT wanted to reduce number of vendors they manage, thereby reducing time lost to vendor finger pointing in its complex UC&C environments.

The U.S.-based global manufacturer was facing high operating expenses due to outdated data centers, costing millions per month. The company needed to consolidate its data centers, implement a software-defined networking solution (SDN), automate services, deploy applications faster, and introduce a cloud strategy to reduce operating expenses (OPEX). One of the biggest challenges was transitioning from four legacy to two new data centers within an extremely tight timeline. Any delays would negatively affect the ability to realize projected cost savings. In addition, the consolidated data center footprint would require an expedited ability to triage any problems. This could result in production services delays and the loss of millions of dollars.

The energy company was facing significant service assurance issues across multiple data centers and hundreds of remote branch offices. Degradations and slowdowns in customer-facing web-services like online access to outage maps, bill paying history and smart meter data were unacceptable. The inability to rapidly identify service availability issues associated with the company’s customer resource management (CRM) system, and pinpoint slowdowns in the customer portal for interactive power control, online bill pay and power outage reporting, left customer satisfaction at risk. Furthermore, any delay in the company’s ability to use their applications that track fleet vehicles for effective response to repair and upgrade orders exposes the company to higher expenses associated with staffing, service restoration and vehicle maintenance.

Turkcell’s customers demand superior 24/7/365 service, and achieving that level of service reliability is not easy. The lifeblood of Turkcell’s business is its service performance. If there is any customer-impacting service drop off, it eventually reverberates through to its bottom line. Turkcell’s primary ongoing challenge was that it needed a performance-monitoring tool that provides end-to-end visibility based on real-time, continuous traffic-based intelligence. It also needed to be able to pinpoint performance problems quickly to reduce Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK) and to maintain a flawless customer experience. LTE control plane monitoring, user plane visibility and session tracing must all be visible, as all are indispensable to ensuring and maintaining the exceptional quality service Turkcell subscribers have come to expect. Turkcell also needed customized reporting procedures coupled with real-time intelligence regarding its LTE signaling behavior. Turkcell’s approach is to solve problems proactively, not SERVICE PROVIDER reactively, before they are noticed in their network. So, proactive alarming of budding issues was a much-coveted service triage feature that Anil Ercan Sonmez of Turkcell Operations and his team members needed.

The Financial Services Company had selected the nGeniusONE service assurance platform and InfiniStream appliances to address quality and performance issues impacting their unified communications services at their distributed contact centers. As the IT team was implementing the equipment, they encountered several issues with the network traffic being forwarded by their third-party vendor’s packet brokers to the InfiniStream appliances. Trying to resolve the issues related to packet de-duplication became next to impossible due to product inefficiencies combined with poor customer support and insufficient knowledge from the equipment vendor. Recognizing that NETSCOUT® offered a broad selection of packet flow switch solutions, the IT staff accelerated their schedule for a technology refresh to meet their visibility needs.

The biggest challenge facing this organization was visibility into security threats attacking the business. As a payment processor and provider of financial transaction reconciliation, promptness in completing a request is an imperative. Anything impeding the availability of these services to their clients would be financially detrimental to both the clients and the SaaS provider, not to mention the reputation of the provider. Despite investing in security tools such as a web application firewall (WAF), a DDoS attack impeded access to critical business services for almost half a day. Customers were unable to process payments or reconcile financial transactions while the attack was ongoing. Even though no actual breach occurred, the downtime and reputational damage from an attack had a significant financial impact on the business. Even worse, the existing tools that the security team was using had not helped them detect or mitigate the attack. They needed a new solution that could provide both visibility and counter measures.

A regional telecommunications company was facing high costs for antenna adjustments. Every time an adjustment was needed, the company had to spend a minimum of $1,000 per tower climb. Additionally, tower crews billed $150 per hour when multiple adjustments were needed. This was a significant expense for the company and they were looking for a solution to reduce these costs.

The healthcare insurance provider was experiencing significant network slowdowns that were adversely impacting application services used for patient eligibility inquiries. These slowdowns were causing delays for doctors and hospitals in determining whether prescribed treatments were covered by insurance. This not only impacted patient care but also put the insurer at risk for service level agreement (SLA) violations. The IT team was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of these network slowdowns in order to rapidly triage and improve the mean time to repair (MTTR).

The insurance company was undergoing a company-wide migration to Microsoft Lync® IT and as it was rolling out, call quality issues began to appear. The IT staff was caught up in a classic multi-vendor finger pointing exercise as they failed to isolate the source of the issues to either Microsoft Lync servers, the Audio Codes gateway or yet another vendor’s gateway. The company faced further time lost and delays in problem resolution while the customers and service reps continued to suffer through poor call experiences.

The company had recently acquired a company with a cloud-based solution. However, the monitoring tool the acquired company was using for the cloud-based solution had gaps in capability and was very expensive to maintain and upgrade. The company needed the same visibility and analysis as they were successfully using for the on-premise solution. They needed the level of Unified Communication (UC) monitoring necessary to ensure the high-quality customer experiences the company traditionally delivered. Further, when a performance issue was reported, it was difficult, and sometimes impossible, to isolate the root cause. The company is undergoing a digital transformation and moving to software to take advantage of the speed and agility provided. The acquisition of the cloud-based solution is just the start of their cloud journey. Plans are in development to move other solutions to the cloud, making migration to the cloud a key investment priority. The IT team understands this will bring new layers of complexity and the risk of failure will multiply.

The healthcare organization was facing a delay in transitioning to a Cisco ACI environment due to a lack of visibility to completely identify all the applications and their dependencies that needed to be moved. The problem was further compounded by the complexity and inefficiencies created by multiple existing tools that were incomplete and disconnected, making it difficult for the teams to have common measurements, processes and reporting. The teams decided they needed to re-examine their network monitoring system and upgrade to the latest technologies to handle their requirements now and be positioned for future enhancements. They planned to implement high-quality network and application monitoring from their remote hospitals that have small VMware clusters, and deploy a new VoIP system. This brought up another challenge; ensuring that any solution they were going to implement met the needs of all the IT teams, i.e. Citrix, Voice, database, server, help-desk etc.

The energy company was implementing smart meters across its customer base and placed a significant emphasis on performance, particularly in preventing outages and service degradations to customers. However, the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) service, i.e. the smart meters, relied heavily on network communications, making the company’s back-end infrastructure and applications subject to performance issues. The IT team needed critical visibility into the company’s virtual servers, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and collection engines across distributed data centers, all without having to move between different tools. After the AMI project was implemented, IT faced pressure to improve their troubleshooting abilities for several other business application services including Microsoft Office 365, the Outage Management System (OMS) and Crew Management System. The company needed to ensure quality VoIP services - especially from remote sites and the customer facing contact centers.

The pharmaceutical company was facing network visibility blind spots that were compromising cross-business IT success. They had issues with Unified Communications and Cisco UCS performance transparency. The company had made the strategic decision to deploy open compute technology that offered their organization increased deployment flexibility, as well as associated reductions in both capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX). Management has also established an organizational goal deploying one common performance analytics platform for use across its many information technology (IT) teams. The time came to update their service assurance and packet broker hardware. In response, the company’s satisfied its open compute platform technology goals by earlier selecting the NETSCOUT® “smart data, smarter analytics” approach, which factors a software-based appliance versus traditional hardware solution.

The North American transit authority was facing a fare processing issue that was impacting the ability for riders to automatically “re-load” their fare payment cards at station kiosks. This problem was causing inconvenience to the riders and was affecting the reputation of the transit authority. The IT team was unable to identify the root cause of the issue due to lack of visibility into the fare system’s financial application and underlying technology. The IT team was looking for a solution that would improve network visibility and real-time application monitoring, while extending the value of their legacy IT toolsets.

The financial services provider identified Microsoft Azure as their organizational cloud services platform. The project was a critical undertaking for IT, involving business service & application migrations from numerous data centers to Azure Cloud services across their three geographic regions. The IT leadership team wanted to enhance the security of this solution, which led them to utilize Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, which extended the company’s on-premises network segments into Azure Cloud services using a private connection. As the IT teams worked to establish highbandwidth routers required to support the secure network connection associated with migrating large-scale, business-essential workloads to Azure ExpressRoute, they began seeing performance issues at one of the company’s data centers.

OB Design, a leading online fashion retailer in Taiwan, began experiencing invalid traffic flowing into the company’s network during peak hours every night, increasing server workload. This traffic appeared legal, leading the company to add more hosts to keep pace with the growing network demand. However, when it became clear that the increased traffic was not generating a corresponding rise in orders, OB Design realized it was under attack by hackers. The company's initial approach of reviewing the traffic history of each previous day, searching for suspicious IP traffic, and building a blacklist for the firewall proved too time-consuming and ineffective.

The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) in Mexico faced constant cyber attacks during the 2012 Federal Elections. The attacks were primarily Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS), aimed at disabling the services of the IFE. The institute had prepared for such issues months in advance, increasing the dedicated bandwidth for the election process over 600Mbs, 300 times over the average Web connection in Mexico. Despite the constant attacks, none were successful in disabling the operation of the Preliminary Program of Electoral Results (PREP) or IFE infrastructure.