The company, a multi-billion dollar, publicly traded company that has been supplying devices and services to its customers for more than a century, was planning a strategic initiative to build out their private network and data centers into Google Cloud Platform (GCP). However, they realized there would be a gap in service assurance visibility, which could present issues with customer satisfaction and user experience. The IT goal was to incorporate network and application performance analysis and visibility for this new environment that would equal what they had in the current infrastructure.

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 company faced service edge visibility gaps due to business expansion and remote workforce transitions. These service edges included client edges, network edges, and data center service edges. The client edges were expanded virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments supporting thousands of financial services professionals who had moved from corporate facilities to work-from-home (WFH) environments. The network edges had expanded to include a corporate network added through an acquisition that needed to be merged with the company’s infrastructure. The data center service edges included an expanding mix of Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) facilities and an evolving on-premises operation. The IT team was also tasked with gaining better visibility into the company’s market data feeds environment.

The company’s online application services require constant availability, with consistent responsiveness and performance for their tens of thousands of clients and millions of end-users accessing essential information. The company had recently experienced more than a dozen outages lasting in excess of five hours to triage, troubleshoot, and resolve. In some cases, they required a war room to be spun up involving 20 or more IT staff, vendors, and third-party service providers at all hours of the day and night. Not surprisingly, some of these protracted outages gained the scrutiny of the new CIO and led to the formation of several action plans to reduce and avoid similar future incidents.

The company was experiencing increased financial processing volumes, combined with the company’s own business growth, which was taxing the front door of their Internet presence and by extension limiting their ability to provide value-added services to global customers. This was not a new issue to the IT team — an earlier project designed to consolidate their legacy Internet architecture had stalled. Given the changing demands caused by these financial processing and business growth areas, a much larger Internet architecture enhancement project would be required. Based on the IT team’s planning, this current-day project required re-working and relocating their primary Internet circuits, an increased reliance on Equinix Co‑located (Co-lo) Data Center services, and new, 100GB high-speed backbone between their main data centers.

The regional government agency was undergoing major digital transformations to ensure citizens and employees could seamlessly perform government services digitally. This included migrating applications from private data centers to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Service, redesigning the core transit network between all agencies to Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), and upgrading Internet access for all offices. The infrastructure operations team knew that these digital enhancements would mean greater complexity, more vendors, and increased opportunity for performance issues to emerge. Their previous tools for network and application performance management were outdated and lacked the capabilities to support the new initiatives. They were also planning to engage a managed service approach to the network and application performance project to allow staff to focus on the strategic projects.

The company’s insurance delivery, subscriber needs, and employee experience were all vastly changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Insurance business volume had increased to more than 40 million annual transactions. Nearly 5,000 employees had transitioned from on-premises locations to work-from-home (WFH) environments, including a vast population of Call Center Agents. With more WFH employees, the network and application monitoring effort now included an expanded remote/client service edge of the network that had not yet been instrumented with NETSCOUT smart visibility sources. Similarly, the network edge had expanded to include cloud edges associated with recently completed moves to Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) data centers, Microsoft Azure and Oracle multi-cloud services, and a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) architecture. With blind spots across numerous network edges and on-the-move user and technology services, the IT team was further challenged when outages increased and Help Desk tickets took longer to close.

The customer, a large public school district, was facing an increased volume of cyber attacks during mandated testing periods. The Security Operations (SecOps) team was seeking a Network Detection and Response solution to increase their network visibility and quickly investigate and mitigate any questionable activity. They were particularly interested in changes in traffic behavior during testing periods when bad actors, potentially even students, attempt to take down the environment to avoid taking the tests.

The company had deployed a vendor’s productivity and process control solution that offered Human-Machine Interface (HMI) technology to connect plant floor operators to production-level manufacturing systems. In addition, this vendor technology offered Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) support to manufacturing operations. In supporting this solution, the manufacturer used hundreds of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) across plant floors to support their factory automation efforts. However, one performance issue that impacted the vendor productivity and process control solution proved difficult to resolve. In responding to related plant floor operators’ support requests, IT Operators saw performance latency in the productivity and process control technology was responsible for manufacturing delays, but they were unable to identify root cause despite their best efforts to do so.

The healthcare company was facing challenges with its existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, which was not meeting their needs. They required a solution that supported high bandwidth, low latency, and secure transactions. They also wanted a network that was prepared to handle the future workload of proactive patient monitoring, remote diagnostics with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and AR/VR (Augmented/Virtual Reality) based training. The company needed a secure, low latency, higher bandwidth private 5G solution and turned to NETSCOUT for the nGeniusONE, nGenius Session Analyzer (nSA), TrueCall and nGenius Business Analytics (nBA) toolsets. This provided them end-through-end visibility to all healthcare facilities, and services, across multiple locations in major U.S. cities.

In response to rising cybersecurity threats accompanying the company’s global hybrid workforce transition, the SecOps team oversaw ongoing architectural and environmental reviews to assess their enterprise-wide security profile. One such review identified the presence of significant security risks in one region’s business operations environment, which resulted in SecOps articulating an immediate need to enhance their network visibility, threat intelligence, mitigation controls, and forensic capabilities. These findings prompted the Executive Team to establish a project to enhance the company’s network security posture and evaluate several leading Network Detection and Response (NDR) vendors capable of providing a solution to their immediate cybersecurity requirements.

The company, a North American manufacturer of highly specialized technology for government and commercial customers, was facing challenges in maintaining the integrity of its infrastructure operations. Their network environment, which supports numerous primary branch office locations and remote sites, relied on multi-vendor routers and switches, with a recent introduction of VMware virtual servers. Despite having multi-vendor Unified Monitoring and NetFlow Monitoring tools to assess network and remote site performance, the IT team was not satisfied and wanted to enhance their abilities to assure manufacturing operations health through improved visibility into their remote environments, WAN utilization, and NetFlow traffic, as well as comprehensive monitoring of the devices operating in these locations.

The financial company was undergoing several business technology transitions, including migrating regional Voice Over IP (VoIP) Contact Center technology operations to a Co-located (Co-lo) data center and outsourcing regional primary data center operations to a managed security service provider (MSSP). These changes prompted a reexamination of IT’s long-time commitment to Cisco NetFlow data as the basis for post-incident investigation activities. Advanced Unified Communications (UC) analytics in the Contact Center Co-lo were seen as a needed enhancement, given the increased importance of voice communication exchanges for high-quality customer service experience during the COVID-19 era. The company needed additional visibility across IT operations, as well as the suitability of a NetFlow-only approach to day-to-day incident response.

The company was undergoing a strategic Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) technology transition when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Voice Team was tasked with overseeing a business-critical transition from Cisco Call Manager directly to a Microsoft Teams Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution. The importance of this rollout was heightened by employees’ readiness to leverage the expanded MS Teams video conferencing, chat, voice, and other collaboration tools to replace the face-to-face meetings they used to have with clients and colleagues. As the company’s open-ended hybrid workforce transition continued, the Voice Team had also encouraged multi-vendor UCaaS technology use on employee-preferred platforms, including Cisco Webex and Zoom, in addition to Teams. This added further complexity to the Voice Team’s UC&C visualization and real-time monitoring efforts.

During a merger, the American telecommunications company faced a challenge of choosing between an edge DDoS defense or a centralized DDoS defense. Prior to the merger, the two companies had deployed two different DDoS attack mitigation strategies. Telco B had deployed a centralized scrubbing model which offered a large amount of mitigation capacity in a couple of locations, and the attacks were managed at the scrubbing centers. However, the disadvantage was that attack traffic had to be transported all the way across their network to get to a scrubbing center before being dropped, introducing additional latency and risk to transport links. On the other hand, Telco A had deployed an Edge-based strategy where attack traffic was removed immediately from the network at the internet edge offering the best overall protection for the network. The disadvantage was that the timeline of the project increased as mitigation devices were deployed in more physical locations.

The county’s hospital sites are essential to the community, providing critical care that constituents rely on daily. Timeliness and reliability of network and application performance are of the utmost importance to provide this county’s community with the healthcare services they need. The IT team was juggling performance monitoring in each hospital site and data center location, multiple cloud and SaaS application vendors, as well as in the DMZ and on both sides of their firewalls and load balancers. Real-time insights into the performance of each of these areas would be highly beneficial to troubleshooting efforts.

The IT department of a U.S. state was managing a suite of network and application resources for use by all other departments and agencies of the state for communication and business operations. To meet the growing demands of their stakeholders for modernization of networking resources, the CIO and IT teams began implementing an ambitious digital transformation (DX) strategy that included the construction of new data centers, the closure of others, and increasing cloud services. The intended effect was to improve efficiency and security for government agencies and a distributed workforce. The IT organization quickly realized that to succeed in their DX and modernization initiatives, they also needed to improve their network and application visibility strategy in data centers, extend it to the cloud, and improve services, security, and troubleshooting across the board. The complexity of integrating hybrid infrastructures coupled with migrations to and from other data centers and colocation facilities, cloud services, and security, were hurdles to streamlining operations. Balancing IT resource allocation and implementing reliable private and public cloud backup and recovery solutions were also considerations to future growth plans.

The county’s many departments are often collaborating, requiring constant communication and reliable internet and data center services that are accessible from any location. Real-time testing to measure network and application performance across their infrastructure is critical to maintain business continuity. The county leverages nGenius® Enterprise Performance Management solutions to proactively monitor, test, and troubleshoot performance challenges in the following areas: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), SD-WAN, Bandwidth performance, Internet connections, Applications, UCaaS.

The company's IT team was engaged in several critical digital transformation projects including investing in Equinix colocation (colo) operations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia to bring IT services closer to their remote offices worldwide, which ultimately delivers better service performance to the local employees. They were also leveraging cloud peering connections in Equinix colos with AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute. The company’s individual business entities that depend on the IT organization for their connectivity and applications demand high quality service, often backed by service level agreements. With private data centers in the Americas and digital transformations involving colocation implementations and migrations to AWS cloud, this IT team recognized the need for visibility throughout their distributed ecosystem for ensuring proactive monitoring and troubleshooting to maintain employee productivity and revenue-generating, business activities.

The energy utility company had a gap in performance visibility for their VMware vSphere and ExpressRoute to Azure. They needed to assure the performance of applications and services at substations. The company had implemented NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management to ensure performance and availability of critical applications. However, visibility concerns included their VMware vSphere virtualized environment and around their firewall access points. Both areas seemed to have performance issues regularly and required visibility that could be shared with vendors and security for better, faster collaboration around the problems. Additionally, as they had adopted Office 365 for business services, they experienced a gap in performance visibility which made troubleshooting user problems a challenge.

The city was facing performance issues with critical applications, affecting operations at multiple fire stations and disrupting communication with city officials. Constituents reported call quality issues when communicating with city officials. The city leaders became aware of network and application performance issues affecting emergency service systems and calls into various fire stations. This prompted them to investigate other sites like community and art centers, police stations, and library branches. They wanted to improve communication quality for 311 services to ensure the public had an outlet to connect with non-emergency city services and would always be well informed. After the city investigated their network and application environment, they uncovered significant performance issues.

The company, a multi-billion-dollar communications company with millions of consumer and business subscribers across a globally distributed environment, needed a visibility solution to monitor and secure data centers, contact centers, retail stores, and network edge environments. They were challenged to scale visibility in their high-speed data centers while undergoing tool consolidation. Some of the most compelling issues driving visibility with NETSCOUT solutions included: Availability and performance of customer-facing web sites and portals, quality and performance consistency for service representatives on customer calls in contact centers, avoiding and quickly troubleshooting quality issues, VPN performance, security, and access availability for remote employees to corporate services, quality employee user experience in remote offices with all applications hosted in corporate data centers or SaaS / UCaaS provider environments, and availability and performance of customer records and product inventory applications for sales agents in retail stores using local wi-fi.

The service provider was facing performance issues that were impacting their internal communications and customer interactions. They needed a solution that could monitor and troubleshoot issues in their data centers, contact centers, retail stores, and network edge environments. The performance of their network and applications was crucial for their operations, and any disruptions could impact their revenue, customer care, and reputation. The IT team was using a performance management tool, but it had several limitations, including the inability to analyze data from all devices in a single screen and lack of support for their digital transformations like cloud and virtualization initiatives.

The Insurer uses a heavily trafficked public Web portal to help deliver its Workers Compensation insurance services to small- and medium-sized employers, the injured workers reporting those claims, and the Insurance Agents and Medical Providers affiliated with processing claims and delivering needed care. The Insurer’s IT team recently updated the website to support mobile device access for employers, injured workers, and other users. However, when the Insurer’s Web portal began experiencing performance issues, the IT team found it did not have visibility into internal east-west traffic in the data center’s virtualized environment necessary to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. The IT team’s existing third-party technologies did not offer necessary visibility into the virtualized environment or troubleshooting tools necessary to execute repeatable, corrective troubleshooting processes.

The State & County Judiciary network, which supports hundreds of court locations and processes millions of transactions annually, was facing several IT challenges. The network was generating more than 300,000 business transactions an hour, and any delays in logging in, accessing information, or using email could have a significant impact on the day's operations. The IT team needed to reduce the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and enhance visibility to monitor the traffic from the remote sites to the primary data center over third-party WAN circuits. They also faced the implementation of Cisco infrastructure upgrades and wanted complete 'before-and-after pictures' to ensure the new environment was properly configured. The Applications team needed a solution to troubleshoot why its newly deployed custom applications were generating performance issues in supporting service delivery to Municipal Court locations, causing user backlogs and daily transaction delays. The UC team required an enhanced solution for identifying baseline metrics (e.g., MOS) in their Cisco environment to report on voice performance issues.

The Canadian public healthcare agency was facing a challenge of ensuring 'always on' access to networks and applications for health organizations and providers. The IT team was under tremendous pressure to ensure its new electronic health record system and data centers offered flawless network connectivity with hundreds of patient care providers. The challenge IT faced was a lack of comprehensive visibility across its geographically dispersed, mission-critical data centers and both physical and virtual infrastructures. Network Operations had very limited tools for monitoring network and application performance. IT triage and troubleshooting would take hours, if not days to complete. This meant IT was spending upwards of 50 percent of its time on service issues, and in some cases the problems went unresolved far longer than acceptable. Due to the vast amounts of healthcare data and the complex, multitiered applications that were in use, it proved extremely arduous to pinpoint the root cause of application slowness – potentially impacting patient care.

The global energy company was facing the challenge of ensuring flawless performance of vital services. Any network or system disruption could harm the business and the company’s reputation for excellent customer service. The company needed not only troubleshooting ability but also end-to-end visibility and analysis allowing them to proactively solve problems before impacting customers or risking regulatory compliance issues. Additionally, the company was on the verge of a major move to the cloud to meet future requirements of the business. This meant IT needed a scalable monitoring solution that could handle current demands, while at the same time providing seamless expansion into the cloud, offering continued visibility into service availability and performance.

The IT department of a U.S. City oversees the 3-1-1 Call Center operations for the City’s non-emergency services, including processing residential service requests for such situations as street repairs, graffiti removal, illegal vending, or large bulk-item pick-up. The IT team’s annually published Strategic Plan provides multi-year quality metrics regarding 3-1-1 Call Center program goals for reducing call waiting times and minimizing dropped call instances. In addition to improving Call Center quality, the City‘s Mayor has empowered the IT department to help transform the number of digital platforms available for 3-1-1 citizen outreach. As a result, the City is updating its 3-1-1 platform to better leverage Web-based and mobile requests from residents. In providing wide-ranging support, the City’s 3-1-1 website uses form-based request templates to enable residents to issue support requests relating to non-emergency service issues.

The global investment bank was struggling with intermittent disruptions and outages to their critical business services. They lacked the visibility to identify or quickly resolve problems when they arose. Uptime and performance visibility were key to this team. Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) services were a particular pain point. Recently, IT had deployed a new state-of-the-art video conferencing application so that the CEO could address the company at all hands meetings. The service needed to support hundreds of employees connecting simultaneously, but the first video conference they used the service for did not go well. Calls were dropped in some cases and call quality was poor for others.

As a large American Carrier Service Provider (CSP) prepared their network to support the 5G cloud edge, they realized during the planning stage that the use of traditional dedicated COTs servers would no longer support the robust nature of their 5G edge network. The transactions at the 5G edge required extreme agility on-demand, faster deployment of services and network resources, elasticity to scale traffic up and down, and automated visibility for service assurance. The CSP needed a solution that could provide these capabilities while ensuring robustness and visibility.