Large Public School District Ensures a Quality Return to In-Person Learning With NETSCOUT

• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
• Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security
• Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
• Networks & Connectivity - WiFi

• Education

• Human Resources
• Logistics & Transportation
• Quality Assurance

• Remote Collaboration
• Remote Control
• Remote Patient Monitoring

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• Data Science Services
• System Integration

The large public school district, with over a hundred separate buildings and tens of thousands of students, faced the challenge of assuring a high-quality learning experience for students and faculty during on-campus and hybrid learning. The district needed to provide troubleshooting visibility throughout the network infrastructure for quick resolution of security, network, and/or application issues to improve Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). The district also had to prepare for the possibility of returning to remote instruction at any time due to weather conditions or other circumstances. The IT staff at the district was tasked with upgrading the monitoring of network operations and applications within the local area network and linking their other facilities. The district needed to balance the creative efforts of the IT teams and financial resources across the district’s whole infrastructure.

The customer is a large, public school district with over one hundred separate buildings and tens of thousands of students. Despite their recent return to in-person instruction on campus, there is now an expectation that remote instruction can be returned to at any time. Specifically, it is not uncommon to have days when the weather makes it difficult or impossible for this school district to transport all of their students to school in a safe manner. To maximize class time for students, the district wishes to eliminate weather related closures and re-engage their remote learning facilities at those times. Students regaining educational ground from long periods of remote learning, especially before the district perfected it, cannot afford further interruptions. Certain government funds were available to assist in these efforts and were applied for and used to better prepare the district to enable remote learning during inclement weather conditions or other circumstances. In addition to this ongoing commitment to remote learning, the IT Staff at the district has now turned its attention to upgrading the monitoring of network operations and applications within the local area network and linking their other facilities. Supporting hybrid learning means balancing the creative efforts of the IT teams and financial resources across the district’s whole infrastructure.

The school district embraced NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution and benefited from strategically deployed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances in some locations throughout its private data center environment. With the addition of ISNG appliances and nGenius Packet Flow Switches (PFS) to route various streams of traffic of interest to the ISNG tools, the visibility into packets outside and inside the DMZ, and inbound and outbound is now complete. The district is gaining service assurance visibility in the following ways: Student and Faculty connections to the central environment take place through Virtual Private Cloud edge devices and they reach the central routers of the data center through high-capacity links which are also monitored by NETSCOUT. Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) Environment is monitored for call and voice performance. vSTREAM virtual instance is deployed in the VMware environment to monitor east-west traffic activity in the virtual infrastructure. Application Assurance for services for both cloud-hosted and their central data center routing and switching architecture, smart data monitoring and smart analytics from nGeniusONE with ISNG appliances is provided. Key applications include learning platforms such as Google Meet, Blackboard and Zoom, as well as communication applications for staff such as email, Office 365, and VoIP. Additional Capabilities – Accelerated troubleshooting, problem resolution, and capacity planning, leveraging the entire NETSCOUT solution, to reduce the MTTR for services by pinpointing the true source of degradations, outages, bottlenecks and errors throughout the transaction path, including the data center servers, the network itself and any associated VPNs.

• A unified NETSCOUT solution provides detailed analysis of the operation and availability of key applications and services that support on-campus and remote learning, as the re-balancing of this new hybrid learning environment takes place.
• Assuring quality student and instructor experience optimizes learning time and understanding of the instruction being provided.
• The District is finding that the role of technology in learning, even when it primarily takes place on-campus, is a growing one.

• Reduced MTTR for student and faculty-facing issues
• Cost-effective implementation of visibility and service assurance solution to enable high quality connectivity