The insurance company was facing challenges due to its robust business growth. The Network Management team was soon to be responsible for delivering high-quality network services supporting critical insurance and financial transactions across more than 400 company sites, including local Contact Centers and cross-continent agency locations. The company planned to take advantage of Software Defined Networking (SDN) operating efficiencies by introducing VMware virtualized servers. However, they were experiencing voice slowdowns in the company’s enterprise environment which was impacting the company’s ability to support real-time telephone business with customers. These slowdowns were frustrating and, at times, even professionally embarrassing to the agents responsible for first-level communications with customers. With the acquisition, IT would also be responsible for monitoring Cisco SIP trunking environments at hundreds of local contact center and needed visibility into those locations.

The financial services company lacked comprehensive visibility into network and application performance in the data center, at their multiple branch offices and third-party affiliate locations, as well as to their cloud-based services. This limited their ability to investigate complex, ongoing problems. They also wanted to get ahead of issues to avoid customer impact. The IT team wanted end-to-end visibility into their wire data so that they could baseline and historically trend data to understand normal application performance, as well as proactively detect degradations in network, voice, and application performance. Specific areas of concern were external SaaS tools for Customer Resource Management, such as Salesforce, which they rely on for critical business operations, and VoIP services that are used for internal and external communication. Additionally, they had a custom application that was critical to the business, which ran in a Citrix environment. It was of great importance to be able to understand the performance and availability of the custom application, the Citrix service, and their underlying dependencies at all times.

The Civilian Government Agency was facing several challenges in delivering services to residents across a geographically vast region. The agency operators relied heavily on Cisco IP voice technology for their daily activities, and any delay, echo, or other impairments could compromise service delivery. The agency had more than 500 remote sites that the IT team was responsible for monitoring, all of which were reliant on high-quality voice performance. Local IT support at these remote locations was limited, meaning overall UC, application, and network monitoring fell on centralized IT resources. The agency was also expanding a rollout of a Microsoft Skype for Business platform for enterprise use, and visibility into this cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) would require technology that was not in the IT team’s current toolset.

A tier one operator is preparing to rollout VoLTE services nationwide. However, the operator is concerned about the readiness of the network and engineering teams for the anticipated traffic volumes. The operator is also worried about the difficulty of tracking the quality of VoLTE services on a national scale. There are fears that any negative publicity will slow the uptake of VoLTE services and erode brand equity. Additionally, latent performance issues could result in project delays or require rollback.

A tier one operator is looking to accelerate the uptake and use of VoLTE services. As part of a regional promotion, subscribers have been offered new VoLTE-enabled devices. However, initial employee trials with these devices in the region indicate that VoLTE call drop ratios are increasing. The operator is concerned that isolating the cause of these drops will consume troubleshooting teams and require costly escalations. Furthermore, the inability to resolve the problems quickly will delay the targeted launch of VoLTE services. There are a number of issues that can contribute to VoLTE call drops. Coverage gaps often occur due to changes in topology or neighbor cell interference. Visibility to the SIP messages between the Call Session Control Function and the Telephony Application Server can provide valuable information about current and future RAN coverage needs. Phased upgrade activities can result in mismatched software loads and incompatible handover situations between eNodeBs.

The network operations team of a large US service provider was facing issues during network upgrades. Optimized configuration settings were being overridden, leading to problems such as improperly tagged subnets and Quality of Service (QoS) mismatch issues. This was impacting the call quality for customers. The team needed a solution that could proactively monitor the network and detect potential problems before they caused an outage or affected operations.

The MSO was facing a challenge with their Video on Demand (VoD) system. An error occurred with the movie poster server that delivers information to the set-top box. Subscribers would select a preferred title and receive something else, causing them to abandon the movie within the first few minutes of the rental. The MSO lacked direct visibility into the VoD experience from a subscriber’s point-of-view and wanted to understand why so many VoD views were abandoned within the first few minutes of purchase. VoD delivery is a complex, multi-step process. A typical user’s journey includes connecting, authenticating and finally accessing the chosen content. Behind the scenes, thousands of packets are passed between multiple servers and during these exchanges, any number of issues can occur.

Network operators must have precise visibility into subscriber roaming performance issues for home and partnered network elements in order to proactively assess performance. In one market at 3:00 a.m. local time, a large US service provider detected traffic failures for 100% of inbound roaming subscribers. The challenge was to quickly identify the scope, impact, and root cause of the issue.

During a high-profile sporting event, a North American Carrier Service Provider (CSP) was faced with the challenge of ensuring a superior experience for its subscribers, particularly corporate and VIP accounts. The event attracted thousands of attendees and hundreds of visitors to the city, creating additional demands on the CSP's brand. The challenge was to proactively manage subscribers' behavior and experience in near real-time to protect the carrier's reputation.

One of the largest carrier service providers (CSPs) in North America has been investing in multiple vendors and their separate service assurance products for years. Each of these vendors provides a partial view of the network, but complete end-to-end visibility is absent. The carrier has been spending millions each year on service assurance products alone. It has become a heavy burden to the CSP on both CAPEX and OPEX to expand, maintain and operate the disparate products from these many vendors. The CSP made the strategic decision to consolidate vendors for service assurance products in order to reduce CAPEX and OPEX. They needed one single solution for their complex network that delivers end-to-end visibility and improved Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

As part of the utility’s ongoing effort to improve the customer experience and drive greater efficiency, smart grid technology, including smart meters were being rolled out to all customers. Because smart meters must be able to transfer information to the smart grid data center effectively and efficiently, reliability and performance of the Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is absolutely imperative. Slow connections were creating delays in data collection, which meant customers couldn’t get real-time meter information on their mobile app or web portal. As the utility plans to roll out more time-based services and variable billing, data performance will be vital. In order to meet the growing data demands of the business, the utility’s IT team faced the challenge of proactively monitoring and troubleshooting its networks. The existing solution, which was cumbersome and time-consuming, only provided reactive troubleshooting and had no ability to triage problems once intermittent symptoms ceased. IT needed the ability to perform forensics on past smart grid performance issues in order to determine the root cause after the fact, allowing them to make proactive corrections and prevent future problems. In addition, IT needed a solution to monitor and manage voice-over IP (VoIP) in the utility’s call centers for real-time issue discovery and problem solving.

The pharmaceutical company plays a crucial role supporting a national program that provides government-subsidized pharmacy transactions for eligible recipients. The company serves as a processing intermediary between drug stores, insureds, and the government. The company’s network operations are based at two data centers, and they are critical for keeping the benefits program up and running. Any network latency that delays POS transactions can also jeopardize patients’ abilities to fill their prescriptions at agreed-to government rates. In the past, when network-impacting issues occurred, the company’s Network Engineering team used a post-event troubleshooting approach based on a legacy forensic packet capture tool. As this forensic tool approached end-of-life, Network Engineering saw an opportunity to improve their network monitoring approach and enhance benefits program service delivery efficiency.

The pharmaceutical company was undergoing a strategic transition towards prioritizing the deployment of open compute platforms. The Network Infrastructure team found the open compute approach appealing due to increased flexibility and reduced capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX). However, they were also scrutinizing their investment in the packet broker hardware appliances deployed at the primary data center. The team found the packet broker appliances were costly to update, with additional hardware-based packet blades required for some new features, at additional CAPEX and OPEX. The team needed a seamless transition from the legacy network monitoring solution to their preferred open compute platform.

The Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit health care operation, faced a significant challenge when the Vocera badges used for intra-caregiver communications were not being recognized in the hospital’s neonatal clinic. The badges, which provide instant communication between doctors, nurses, and other critical caregivers, were not getting on the network properly. This was a serious issue as the badges are mission critical to the neonatal clinic. The malfunction was potentially threatening lives. The Cleveland Clinic enterprise network is vast with over 48TB of wide area network (WAN) traffic per day and 18TB per day of Internet traffic. Its data center distribution through its NFS/ SMB Windows® and Linux® servers surpasses 200TB daily. With 165,000 active ports, the Cleveland Clinic enterprise network has as its cornerstone seven Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform, which combines multiple network elements including voice, video and data solutions, and an AT&T DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) optical technology overlaying its existing fiber optic backbone.

The organization had gone through a period of substantial growth due to additional customers and increased exchange volume, combined with several mergers and acquisitions. As a result, in order to continue to deliver technology and services at the high level they were known for, the IT organization was in the process of a strategic data center transformation. Central to this transformation was a new data center based on Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), along with targeted migration to public cloud, initially to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Visibility and security of the new data center, the several other data centers around the world for regional access throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as their customer facing network were of paramount importance. As a result of aggressive expansion and acquisitions, the IT team had inherited a very diverse range of technologies and vendors, sometimes providing similar services, although delivering inconsistent experiences for the end users. The problem only snowballed as the organization relied on more parties for pieces of their infrastructure. The boundaries of responsibility between the growing number of infrastructure technology and vendors were becoming blurred, and the time to troubleshoot issues was increasing.

The company’s Security Operations (SecOps) team faced new business and compliance management challenges that were surpassing current IT toolset capabilities. The New York State government had enacted requirements upon any financial institutions that required those businesses operating in NY to implement cybersecurity measures, report data breaches, identify whether the threat traveled past the point of initial infiltration, and provide associated network packet captures as further evidence of effective forensic security analysis used to successfully troubleshoot the breach. The company had to deploy a complete solution in an accelerated timeframe in order to meet a State-specified deadline for organizational compliance; otherwise, the business would be subject to government fines and adverse impacts to brand reputation. As part of strategic business initiatives, the company decided to move certain data center workloads to cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure) platforms, as well as newly added Equinix co-location facilities. However, when an Equinix co-lo facility reported an outage with Azure services, the CISO learned the company’s existing IT toolsets lacked visibility into this new hybrid cloud environment necessary for troubleshooting and remediating performance anomalies, so that business services could be quickly restored for customers and users.

The company’s Security Operations (SecOps) team faced new business and compliance management challenges that were surpassing current IT toolset capabilities. The New York State government had enacted requirements upon any financial institutions that required those businesses operating in NY to implement cybersecurity measures, report data breaches, identify whether the threat traveled past the point of initial infiltration, and provide associated network packet captures as further evidence of effective forensic security analysis used to successfully troubleshoot the breach. The company had to deploy a complete solution in an accelerated timeframe in order to meet a State-specified deadline for organizational compliance; otherwise, the business would be subject to government fines and adverse impacts to brand reputation. As part of strategic business initiatives, the company decided to move certain data center workloads to cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure) platforms, as well as newly added Equinix co-location facilities. However, when an Equinix co-lo facility reported an outage with Azure services, the CISO learned the company’s existing IT toolsets lacked visibility into this new hybrid cloud environment necessary for troubleshooting and remediating performance anomalies, so that business services could be quickly restored for customers and users.

The European insurance company was planning a network migration which highlighted network performance issues and blind spots. With the increasing adoption of mobile and web platforms by insurance customers, the IT team's need for real-time monitoring was also increasing. The company's IT team was managing a multi-tier network environment used for delivering business services to agency representatives working at regional offices, as well as corporate-level users. They had concerns about their long-time third-party technology's ability to support the company's digital transformation. They were also concerned about how potential network monitoring tool limitations would impact the success of a network upgrade designed to offer increased performance necessary for supporting more company applications, devices, users, and customers.

The insurance company was facing long-standing Unified Communications (UC) performance challenges, such as dropped calls, which frustrated both agents and IT employees. Their existing tools could not visualize the UC traffic traversing the infrastructure, and troubleshooting processes were resource-intensive and lengthy. The company needed a solution that could easily integrate into their existing business processes and technology environment without requiring significant architectural changes, extensive user training, or a major learning curve for generating UC monitor views, relevant reports, or troubleshooting workflows.

The agency had recently completed a migration to a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined network (SDN) offering improved 40GB link speeds. While the technical conversion itself had completed, the regional IT team subsequently found themselves trying to work through visibility limitations in this new SDN environment, particularly involving the updated 40GB network links and within data center operations. In addition to wanting to visualize upgraded performance, another IT team involved in this project was focused on protecting the integrity and availability of these SDN links. For the IT team, this effort was critically important, as these high-speed Internet links supported customer-facing tax and financial transactions that had been targeted in frequent cyberattacks.

The organization had historically used multiple service providers to protect their globally distributed datacenters, depending on the regional availability of such services from the providers. They contacted NETSCOUT® in 2019 to help them simplify their DDoS mitigation infrastructure by replacing the different service providers with one single provider-agnostic service that could also cover all global locations. This enabled them to have a single SLA with 1 company rather than the multiple provider option, which was extremely difficult, complex and expensive to manage. In times of attack an organization needs clarity and a consistent platform to protect themselves rather than different SLA’s with multiple vendors in all locations. The company fell victim to a series of complex targeted DDoS attacks at the end of December 2019 which spilled over into January 2020. A particular application service was impacted so much that it threatened to halt all the of the company’s flights from taking off worldwide affecting all packages to be delivered.

The IT team at the Latin American retail bank was facing challenges with their existing vendor tools. These tools were reportedly difficult to manage and were unable to address hard-to-resolve issues in the bank’s infrastructure environment. The bank had also outsourced some IT administration activities to a major business consulting company, whose assigned resources were unable to reduce the lengthy mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) cycles and resolve network and infrastructure incidents. These challenges prompted IT leadership to pursue alternate solutions to address these troubleshooting issues.

The financial services company was facing visibility limitations into their financial business service performance. They had been monitoring the perimeter of the wide area network (WAN) and primary data center operations using NETSCOUT InfiniStream® appliances to visualize those links and nGeniusONE analytics to assess performance. However, the Network Operations (NetOps) team wanted to improve visibility into, and monitoring of, business services supporting customers’ financial transactions. They were convinced their business service monitoring goals would only be met by deploying new data sources to provide visibility inside company data centers and into banking & internet cores.

Aon, a leading global professional services firm, faced significant sprawl across their estate due to over 400 acquisitions. This led to monitoring sprawl with multiple tools and no single platform for global visibility, analysis, and reporting. The company needed a more effective way to monitor and triage their services across the multiple global network performance hubs to which all offices connect. As the organization embarked on their UCC transformation, they needed to ensure that as they standardized and simplified their communications and collaboration platforms, they could provide a view of performance, utilization and capacity as they moved from the legacy sprawl to the future state platforms.

The hospital had been relying on a vendor's tools for network troubleshooting and trend reporting. However, the performance of the vendor's installed data sources was becoming unreliable, leading to issues with accessing packet-level forensic data for troubleshooting and reporting. This was exacerbating the challenges to stay ahead of disruptions and effectively extending the time to troubleshoot patient care-impacting issues. These issues became more pronounced just as the hospital had begun adding new healthcare entities and applications. Early application and Wi-Fi network issues at one remote location had already been reported to IT. Facing these collective technology issues and their impact on healthcare delivery, IT leadership began examining other vendor solution approaches available to the organization.

The organization, a large financial center in Western Europe, was heavily reliant on its ISP for security monitoring and mitigation of potential DDoS attacks. However, the ISP was not equipped to handle larger mitigations at specific customer sites, and their priority was to protect their backbone. The organization was also concerned about meeting newly implemented banking regulations around infrastructure security specifically focused on DDoS activity. The organization's internal infrastructure was also deemed underpowered and not acceptable for battling incoming DDoS attacks. The organization realized that they were too dependent on outside management of the risks that come from potential DDoS attacks and needed to bring that risk management in-house to ensure more control and quicker reaction time.

The government agency was experiencing an increase in remote users, which corresponded to increased traffic volumes accessing agency resources in the data center. This was causing network traffic and bandwidth issues in key enterprise areas tied to remote users accessing applications. These changes in volume were presenting significant performance and availability challenges for the IT staff. The agency was also seeing employees, connected to the enterprise network over the VPN, streaming music, TV, and movie services like Netflix, Comcast, and YouTube, which were consuming a large amount of the bandwidth.

The government agency was facing a significant increase in network bandwidth consumption due to the sudden shift to remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This was putting a strain on their existing VPN capacity and Internet bandwidth. In addition to this, the agency was also tasked with supporting a new temporary unemployment program designed to provide financial assistance to residents who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic. The launch of a new dedicated website for accessing these benefits was expected to further tax the agency's already strained Internet resources. The agency's IT team lacked the necessary visibility to determine how the additional VPN and Internet capacity was performing.

The high-tech company was looking to transition from a private cloud solution to a multi-cloud environment involving strategic partners like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This transition required strategic planning to ensure visibility and monitoring of applications moving to the public cloud to assure performance was not adversely impacted by lift-and-shift activities. Another technical initiative facing the IT team involved offering improved access to network packets for the IT Security team for use with downstream security tools being used at company global data centers.

The government-operated toll road authority oversees a roadway network that annually supports millions of residential, business, and visitors traveling throughout the region. The authority has distinguished itself by executing a number of infrastructure projects on schedule across the region, as well as transitioning to a toll plaza network that relies on the use of transponders and vehicle stickers to process automatic fare payments. This state-of-the-art system reduces the delays associated with manual collection of cash-based transactions at toll booths. By largely eliminating manual toll booth collections, the authority has improved the flow of traffic across regional roadways and improved the quality of the driving experience as a result. However, automated toll collection depends on scanning vehicle transponders and windshield-mounted stickers, matching them to registered customers, and successfully processing payment billing and collection. This is a complex technology service, and disruptions can be challenging to pinpoint.