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Metropolitan Public School District Ensures Quality Student Learning Experience
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Human Resources
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Remote Collaboration
- Remote Control
- Remote Patient Monitoring
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The school district was faced with the challenge of assuring a high-quality learning experience for students and faculty during a time of increased remote learning and as schools rebalance to on-campus instruction. They needed to provide troubleshooting visibility throughout the network infrastructure with excellent Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). The tremendous growth in network traffic on these systems created monitoring challenges. Particularly challenging was performance and bandwidth availability in the final mile to students’ homes and the Quality of Service (QoS) labels used for traffic prioritization for remote learning content within their large datacenters, and across the internet to their students’ homes. One primary goal of this project was to implement and monitor WAN services between data centers, schools and students to ensure sufficient bandwidth was available and to verify that QoS assignments were delivering applications in the correct priority class.
About The Customer
This public school district, which encompasses one of the largest cities in North America, has over ten thousand employees and many tens of thousands of students. The broadly distributed district has years of experience providing education to their very diverse student population. The district’s experienced leadership team elected to view the dramatic rise in remote learning support requirements not as a temporary crisis but as an opportunity to pivot to a hybrid learning model, implementing the infrastructure to support an engaging, instructive experience for all their students and staff, regardless of where they were located.
The Solution
The school district was already utilizing the nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution with distributed nGeniusONE servers, and nGeniusONE Stand-by units. NETSCOUT® InfiniStreamNG® (ISNG) appliances are deployed outside and inside the datacenters and to the school edge to examine both inbound and outbound traffic. The IT team is leveraging their service assurance visibility from NETSCOUT to monitor bandwidth, traffic prioritization and content filtering. High Capacity links within the Datacenter are monitored by NETSCOUT 5100 PFS including 10gigE and 40gig. The PFSs are managed with NETSCOUT’s graphical interface in NS Fabric Manager in order to allow operators to bring tools to bear quickly and make changes to the monitoring network easily. nGeniusPULSE is used from schools to test logins to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) implementations at datacenters, and to test the performance of Windows Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) installations which are hosted on Azure.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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