The insurance company decided to upgrade their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to an Oracle platform to enhance customer experience and agent efficiency. However, after the deployment, the IT team began receiving complaints about slow response times between Oracle insurance applications and agency devices. The IT team lacked visibility into the new Oracle CRM environment necessary for real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and restoring responsive operations for thousands of their regional insurance agent offices.

The IT team of a large-scale government agency was facing numerous challenges with a heavily used mobile communications application. Field users reported that the process of sending an email for encrypted transactions was taking more than 60 seconds, which was prompting those frustrated agents to repeatedly contact the IT service desk for resolution. Fifty percent of application transactions were being categorized as slow. The SaaS provider hosting the app was a company operating on another continent, further complicating efficient troubleshooting. As this encrypted app was also highly used by government agency management, improving real-time monitoring of this application’s performance represented a high-profile issue for the IT team. They also recognized the importance of gaining visibility into all their applications in a more holistic, cost-effective manner.

The company was undergoing a transformation of its data center operations, migrating some of its business applications to a cloud-based Nutanix TierPoint co-located (Co-lo) facility. However, they were experiencing visibility limitations that made it difficult to determine whether the migrated applications were performing reliably. They also had visibility limitations into their Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Oracle services, which made it challenging to assure the performance of applications used by guards and personnel to manage on-site operations at correctional and residential facilities. Additionally, the company had been given several months to comply with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) measurements, which required evidence of organizational conformity with safeguards relating to network monitoring for performance and availability, preventing cybersecurity breaches, and protecting client and employee healthcare and financial data.

The company, a global leader in the business process outsourcing (BPO) and consulting services industry, was facing visibility gaps in application performance and data center migration. Despite using many vendor tools, network and application performance issues had emerged in one service delivery region. Visibility gaps had also surfaced across the business, making it difficult for IT resources to monitor company business traffic, application performance at some on-premises and co-located data centers, and applications being migrated from one data center to another. The company was looking for a vendor-neutral solution that could address visibility and performance issues using real-world use cases and workflows.

The bank was running some of their customer-facing and back office applications in a mainframe environment. However, the increasing operating expenses involved with this approach were becoming too high to ignore. The bank decided to refactor existing applications from the mainframe and migrate them to an on-premises, virtualized, data center environment. This process involved Webtiered, middleware, and multi-tier technologies that would function as production staging to monitor and stabilize these apps prior to an eventual cloud migration. During this process, the Network Operations team hit a roadblock: there were visibility issues into performance of existing mainframe applications that their open source and vendor app monitoring tools could not troubleshoot.

The manufacturer was in the process of migrating some critical business services to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and implementing a new Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosting environment in the primary data center. They needed to ensure a consistent highest quality end-to-end visibility in the hybrid cloud. Critically important to their day-to-day operations were key business services, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP, sales operations, inventory management, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. If any of these applications experience slowdowns or disruptions before, during or after the migration process, the impact on revenue, production, and customer service can become significant. The world was in its earliest stages of dealing with the possibility of dramatically increased remote workers/work-at-home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This added to both the importance and urgency of adding visibility for performance analysis for the ISP hosting environment, given the possibility of having tens of thousands of employees working from home around the world.

The biopharma company was undergoing a digital transformation of its services and infrastructure, which required additional visibility. The company needed real-time monitoring of IT service platform transitions and new data center services. The company's technology landscape was frequently changing due to acquisitions, partnerships, and internal growth activities. There were near-term needs to monitor services in transition, including custom application performance and dependencies for apps running on servers being relocated across the enterprise, performance of DNS services migrating to a new hosting data center, and Office 365 performance in an upgraded 10G network environment. The IT provider also needed real-time monitoring of network traffic during data center migration activities, as well as network capacity management forecasting required to assess the need for a wide area network (WAN) upgrade.

The multi-billion-dollar high-tech global manufacturing company was facing a challenge in delivering excellent performance management and monitoring with limited IT resources. The company was investing in the latest technologies and needed to fill gaps in visibility to their complex, evolving network. The company had increased their corporate network from 1 GB to 10 GB in many locations, implemented several Software-as-a-Service applications, including Microsoft® Office 365 and Skype for Business, and upgraded their voice and video services to Polycom. However, issues arose that impacted users and required IT intervention to pinpoint and correct. The resources available to support monitoring and managing their current tools had declined, leading to changes being made that broke the data collection, which caused gaps in visibility.

The manufacturer had more than a dozen development centers with varying levels of on-premise data center equipment. The company had deployed a common architecture at the time – hosting most of their core services, like e-mail, unified communications (UC), file sharing, authentication (i.e., Microsoft Active Directory), and customer resource management (CRM) – in the primary data center, with expensive Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) links supporting remote site access. However, this approach had an expensive total cost of ownership, required high touches to maintain, and needed IT professionals to help troubleshoot. The manufacturer needed greater agility in service changes than this deployment allowed them, and they knew IT transformations offered beneficial approaches with significant advantages. Over time, many of their core services had transitioned to cloud and virtual, including Microsoft Office 365 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cisco WebEx collaboration services, SalesForce.com CRM, and ServiceNow service and support software. These new service rollouts were accessed via Internet links at the company’s remote offices.

The company was in the process of implementing several initiatives for digital transformation to optimize business and manufacturing processes as well as internal and external communication. These changes drove the need for Data Center modernization, including upgrading to 40G, migrating to hybrid cloud deployments, and co-locating a portion of their network and applications to a 3rd party site. To support these changes, the IT team needed to deploy new architecture using a new provisioning methodology. They were still confronted with on-going issues affecting users. A few major issues were consuming resources and had the potential to impact business. Of primary concern at the executive level was on-going contact center voice issues with their VoIP service. Although problems were reported regularly, they were not consistent from site to site and not easily resolved.

The company had experienced exponential remote office network changes, with an increase from 50 locations to hundreds of them. To efficiently manage business service delivery to this large-scale remote office network using centralized IT resources, company leadership decided to convert from their hardware-based wide area network (WAN) to a Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). The identified SD-WAN solution involved numerous technology vendors, including VMware, providing VeloCloud SD-WAN, VMware ESXi hypervisor, vRealize Network Insight, and VeloCloud Orchestrator, Avaya Voice Over IP (VoIP) services running at the remote offices, and Universal CPE (uCPE) and Virtual Network Function (VNF) vendor solutions. During standard pre-deployment activities, the IT team began testing the solution, including how the transformed SD-WAN services would support Avaya VoIP business services. The test results they were seeing were problematic, with the VoIP technology not performing reliably over SD-WAN.

The company’s multi-continent business operations footprint includes multiple data center facilities in Europe, Asia, and America. As the pandemic arrived, strategic projects involving Data Center Transformation and MultiCloud Migration were well underway. In this timeframe, IT had to advance strategic project activities, while facing unprecedented remote business service delivery demands. On the strategic side, the IT team was beginning the process of transitioning business applications to the cloud, selecting Microsoft Azure as one of their solution providers. Select data center services were also being migrated to Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) facilities during this timeframe. Tactically, business operations success suddenly became reliant on performance of the company’s virtual private network (VPN). As IT prepared to advance on these strategic and tactical challenges, they quickly found their progress impacted by lack of visibility into an SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application hosted in the company data center environment, Microsoft Azure Cloud-based services and applications, Microsoft Skype for Business (Skype) unified communications (UC) voice and video services, Microsoft Office 365 business applications, Remote applications depending on reliable access to VPN services, Web traffic crucial to Web-based application performance. Existing monitoring toolsets were coming up short. That made it difficult to isolate issues and accurately assign IT ownership. In such scenarios, the Network teams often bear the brunt of finger-pointing, and that was the case here.

The financial company was undergoing digital transformations, including data center upgrades to 100GB in their infrastructure and investments in virtualization and cloud. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced all of their employees to move to a work-from-home model. This resulted in end users experiencing availability and performance issues with critical business and communications applications like Citrix and VoIP services. Despite collaborative efforts between the application and network teams, their legacy point tools lacked comprehensive monitoring and analysis to identify the true source of many of the issues. These issues, and the extended time to resolve, presented an immediate and serious potential for devastating impact to the business.

The financial group was undergoing a long-term data center transformation, network upgrade, Cisco ACI, and mobile application rollout. The near-term transition to a remote workforce was taxing VPN and VDI environments, with a bandwidth upgrade only leading to latency. The IT team was tasked with consolidating several production-level Data Centers to two on-premises corporate locations, upgrading to a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) architecture and 40G network speeds, and deploying a new mobile application.

The digital bank was facing several challenges. The time to resolve issues was delayed, affecting their service quality. They were also struggling to ensure SLAs with 3rd party retailers were met. The bank had set an aggressive goal of resolving all Priority 1 issues within 1 hour of being reported. However, multiple instances of slow connection and poor performance were reported with critical communication and business applications, including their main CRM/banking application. When a global public health crisis resulted in over 2000 call center agents working from home, the 1-hour resolution goal became even more critical. At that time, the work-from-home users started experiencing issues on Webex conference calls. The bank also wanted to reduce the time spent verifying availability during the nightly, manual switch over between 2 main data centers. In the mornings, they wanted to automate the set-up process in the call centers of the applications and dialers to ensure availability and performance before calls come into call center.

The bank's clients have for years enjoyed access to voice-based customer services, with the Call Center operations balanced across two of the company’s regional contact center locations. The Call Centers rely on a multi-vendor environment that includes the following Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) providers: Genesys, Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya. While the IT team was supporting this contact center investment, the bank was managing their business response to COVID-19’s arrival. In safeguarding both clients and employees, the company closed some regional branches, which prompted increased use of remote banking services, including the Call Center. During this time, the Call Center’s staffing approach had also changed, with some of those Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) working at home and others newly relocated into shared office space with other employees. Not only was IT now managing increased use of Call Center resources in this partially remote service delivery environment, they now needed to differentiate whether a service issue related to UC&C technology performance, configuration changes, or a combination of those factors.

The bank was facing several challenges. The functional limitations in the bank’s long-time network performance management (NPM) tools were creating network visibility challenges that prompted technical demands for improvement from the Development, Services, and Infrastructure IT teams. In addition, this legacy NPM technology was not providing the collective IT team with visibility into their local branches necessary for assuring high-quality user experience and efficient financial service delivery. Without clear end-to-end visibility, these IT teams were operating without source data essential to baseline network, application, and business service monitoring. In an environment rich with third-party technology elements and the presence of system integrators, these IT teams needed a reliable monitoring, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis solution to differentiate whether a performance issue stemmed from one of their vendor solutions or in the bank’s internal environment. Along with these day-to-day challenges, an in-progress Data Center Transformation was requiring additional IT cycles to complete. With this project, the network’s core was being migrated to a next-generation technology, with an additional data center location established and a new IT team now responsible for its performance.

The bank faced a significant challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted management to instruct employees to work from home. This led to an unprecedented use of the bank's virtual private network (VPN), posing visibility and monitoring challenges for the IT team. As more employees and clients began to rely on digital platforms for their financial transactions, the bank's IT team had to ensure consistent, high-quality service delivery. The bank's financial livelihood became even more linked to its ability to successfully process online banking, bill-pay services, and other financial transactions that were now critically important for clients in financial need.

The company’s expanded use of remote business locations and digital platforms has transformed the service delivery challenges facing their information technology (IT) team’s leadership. These challenges include expanding visibility needs, enhancing application performance monitoring, managing network bandwidth utilization, and improving IT performance monitoring consistency. With cost containment a strong consideration in this technology refresh, the company wanted innovative solutions and best-practice recommendations regarding how next-generation approaches could address these IT issues and improve insurance and financial services delivery needed to maintain business growth.

The bank was experiencing a surge in mobile transactions which began taxing the bank’s data center network and application resources. This led to customers complaining about Web-based payment issues such as webpage latency and slow application performance. The IT team tried various approaches for solving the performance issues occurring across their mobile and Web payment transactions, including purchasing and deploying a variety of network monitoring tools, all of which were only occasionally detecting and warning of looming performance issues before they impacted customer purchasing activities. The bank’s data center network was expanding, with these new facilities requiring the same levels of visibility and performance monitoring as the current “active/active,” dual-site data center configuration. The bank needed evidence of compliance with regulations defining the country’s government requirements for secure financial operations, including cybersecurity, network, and business performance management technologies.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic required this bank to close numerous regional branches, prompting leadership to alternatively position 24/7 customer account access through mobile and online applications, as well as telebanking. While customers were using these account access options, many banking employees were now moving their offices to their at-home locations. With increased use of remote business operations, the company’s IT team needed to prioritize the performance of the virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) now critical to successful day-to-day financial service delivery. With millions of global clients now reliant on uninterrupted remote account access, it was critical that remote banking operations work seamlessly. Days after this remote transition began unfolding, IT leadership contacted their NETSCOUT business representatives with concerns about visibility into performance of their Citrix Virtual Applications and Desktops. Citrix was a now-critical environment. The bank’s IT leadership had configured Citrix application traffic to be balanced across several company data centers to help assure performance. However, the local IT team could not visualize Citrix application traffic relevant to their business operations, leaving them unable to monitor this virtual environment or end-user experience.

The major issue facing the IT staff at this bank was protecting performance of key voice and banking application services from the data centers, across their WAN, and out to their branches where slowdowns and disruptions negatively impact their customers. Bank teller applications are expected to be delivered seamlessly to the banks, as they supported their customers’ timesensitive savings, checking, loan, and mortgage transactions. The bank also prioritized voice traffic, given the high volume of customer and internal calls generated every day. Performance degradations in any of these services could slow customer service and shake customer confidence and corporate reputation. The bank was a long-time user of NETSCOUT solutions, and with several network digital transformations occurring, they had the opportunity to evaluate the existing deployment and determine the best steps for visibility and service assurance going forward. In addition to the current needs, the IT team wanted to ensure as they continued with some other strategic initiatives (e.g., moving some services to a co-lo site, increasing their Citrix footprint, upgrading segments to 10 GB, and expanding their virtualized server adoption) that the service assurance solution they decided on today would provide them with single pane of glass views and analysis into the future.

The convenience store chain was facing an intermittent problem with some of their payment transactions going missing for some credit card-based payments. The payments were being applied in store, but in some cases, they weren’t reflected on the bank’s end. This caused significant loss of revenue and reputational damage with end-users, who were placed at risk of late fees or loss of services due to payments not processing as expected. The NetOps team lacked the visibility they needed of the transactions to prove to the banks that they had taken place. As a result, they spent countless hours attempting and failing to document the lost transactions with their partner banks.

The resort, part of a major global hospitality and entertainment company, was implementing several data center transformations, including migration to Cisco ACI technology, transition to a Software as a Service application for their reservations application, and enhancements in their contact centers and Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) services for guests speaking with service representatives. During the migration to ACI in their data center, the IT staff needed to troubleshoot a couple of Severity 1 incidents. It was challenging, time-consuming, and put the quality of guests experience at risk. The IT organization quickly recognized the need for in-depth visibility to pinpoint the source of these disruptions.

The communications company operates a network of retail stores for marketing phones, tablets, accessories, as well as cellular phone service and long-term contracts. The company's IT organization has implemented Wi-Fi networks in each of the retail stores for the express purpose of providing connectivity for the sales associates to access Customer Resource Management (CRM) information for consumers coming to the stores; point-of-sale (POS) details for available products and services to sell; Internet access to track competitive offers and access other cloud-based applications; and connectivity to external sites for credit card authorization when completing a sale. The company needed cost-effective visibility into end-user experience at their retail stores for both Wi-Fi and wired access to ensure quality was maintained.

The leading U.S. energy company faced a significant challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The company had to send home 13,000 workers in response to government stay-at-home work orders. This sudden shift to remote work posed a significant challenge to the company's IT infrastructure, particularly its virtual private network (VPN) which had to support a much larger remote user base. The company needed to ensure uninterrupted power delivery to its customers during this critical period. The company's ability to provide uninterrupted energy was crucial, especially for hospitals and other essential services.

The bank’s IT team had long monitored overall performance of their virtual private network (VPN). The VPN represented a significant element of the IT delivery infrastructure – at times, nearly half of the bank’s employees used the remote network to conduct business from their home offices or mobile devices. Also accessing these same services were several thousand authorized, strategic partners and contractors, placing additional volume on this environment. For the IT team, VPN performance management was not as straightforward as assuring adequate bandwidth coverage was in place. The VPN also supported a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) based on Citrix technology that was showing performance strains based on increased users. Remote users reported regularly experiencing frozen virtual desktop screens and timeouts, with associated issues summarized in the trouble tickets forwarded to the Help Desk.

The financial services company was in the final stages of a Data Center Transformation plan, which included consolidating the company’s on-premises data centers and transitioning other technology platforms and application workloads to additional Equinix Co-lo facilities. They were also looking to improve financial services delivery and reduce expenses by better leveraging the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure) multi-cloud environments, as well as expanding regional customer outreach on Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) and Webex voice/video channels to conduct portfolio reviews and shareholder sessions. Furthermore, they needed to assure end-user experience to company workers-at-home who were suddenly relying on formerly underutilized virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platforms for business service delivery.

The gaming company has experienced an increase in business during the current pandemic crisis, on top of their natural growth. Some of their data centers generate tens of millions of packets per second that need to be monitored by generating NetFlow data, and forwarding it to multiple security tools, as well as the custom network and application performance tools that have been developed in house. Current monitoring solutions did not provide complete visibility into all traffic. Appliances with much higher traffic capacity than the existing solution were required for NetFlow generation. High-volume participation in multi-player games can draw millions of unique customers. They also have intensive live support from their IT team on the customer facing network, so the packet broker solution needed to scale for many simultaneous staff users as well as with the different data center locations experiencing different growth rates on the customer side.

The company was facing issues with its VoIP system, with users at different locations experiencing varying levels of performance. Key executives and critical remote sites were reporting quality issues. The IT team was unable to establish what was considered 'normal' performance from any specific location, and VoIP issues were often blamed on the network, even when there were server or application issues. The tool IT initially tried to use to monitor the VoIP system required many hours and resources to write custom scripts for each location, which was not scalable for their multiple global locations.