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Large Western U.S. Electric Utility Relies on NETSCOUT Solution to Assure Safety, Reliability and Compliance
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Energy Management System
- Infrastructure Inspection
- Regulatory Compliance Monitoring
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
The large Western U.S. electric utility was facing difficulty in ensuring service performance with GOOSE protocol, used for power switching, between data centers and substations. The IT team was under pressure to meet NERC-CIP compliance for safety and security with audit trails of servers and ports. Failure to assure NERC-CIP compliance could result in fines up to a million dollars per day. The IT team needed to ensure message transmissions remained within the acceptable latency range to maintain safety in power transmission. They also faced the critical challenge of ensuring the performance of its Energy Management System (EMS) on the transmission network, as well the performance of general business applications on its enterprise network.
About The Customer
The customer is a large Western U.S. electric utility that provides power to millions of customers. The organization leverages smart grid technology to offer various power rate options, such as smart thermostat discounts and time-of-use rate plans. The utility encourages customer power generation and uses smart meters to ensure proper billing credits as customers put excess power back onto the grid. The company is firmly committed to safety, sustainability, upgrading the grid for the future, and serving the community.
The Solution
To address these service performance and monitoring challenges, the utility’s IT team turned to NETSCOUT®. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, along with InfiniStream appliances and Fiber TAPs were employed to enable IT to identify, isolate and mitigate issues quickly. By installing InfiniStream appliances at the data centers and substations, IT is now able to track packet flows to accurately measure latency, even with the uni-directional GOOSE traffic. The NETSCOUT solution allows these latencies to be closely monitored, which is critical for maintaining safety across the utility’s electric distribution network. nGeniusONE provides dashboard views and reports for services, applications, and GOOSE protocol metrics to proactively find problems and enable troubleshooting and compliance.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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