Download PDF
Retailer Assures E-Commerce Website Performance with NETSCOUT
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Retail Store Automation
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The retailer faced a sudden shift to a predominantly e-commerce model due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in a doubling of daily website traffic and a significant increase in e-commerce business volumes. The company's IT operations were critical to this transition, but they faced several challenges. They were relying on a multi-vendor tool mix for monitoring applications and network services, which led to dropped packets and data loss due to increased traffic volumes. There were also emerging 'blind spots' that made real-time monitoring and troubleshooting difficult. These included database authentication problems, user-experience challenges with cloud-based Google Workspace collaboration services for remote employees, and outages in the data link network layer. The company was also trying to build out internal lab environments to test the impact of network performance associated with introducing new applications in the production environment, but this was delayed due to the lack of necessary views for this type of forecasting analysis.
About The Customer
The customer is a global retailer that has successfully transitioned from a retail business model reliant on a brick-and-mortar presence to one that also emphasizes a prominent e-commerce platform. This transition was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a significant increase in online shopping. The company's website is now frequently accessed by millions of consumers who previously made in-person purchases. The company's IT operations have been critical to this transition and their success has been described as essential to overall growth. The company has relied on NETSCOUT’s service assurance solutions and Premium Support Engineering (PSE) resources for visibility into their redundant data center operations for several years.
The Solution
The company decided to extend their commitment to NETSCOUT to meet their growing e-commerce business monitoring demands and address other visibility and troubleshooting challenges. They upgraded their nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform licensing to accommodate deployment on Linux virtual environments. They also deployed NETSCOUT Certified ISNG software appliances to visualize critical data center and e-commerce environments, improve their lab environment views, and support 100GB network speeds. The nGeniusPULSE infrastructure monitoring platform and nPoint hardware and virtual sensors were deployed to conduct synthetic testing that assessed remote user experience. This helped visualize and resolve issues related to both their Google Workspace environment and database authentication problems. Additionally, they added PSE consulting resources to further augment the IT Operators responsible for managing the nGeniusONE, ISNG, and nGeniusPULSE environments.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Improving Production Line Efficiency with Ethernet Micro RTU Controller
Moxa was asked to provide a connectivity solution for one of the world's leading cosmetics companies. This multinational corporation, with retail presence in 130 countries, 23 global braches, and over 66,000 employees, sought to improve the efficiency of their production process by migrating from manual monitoring to an automatic productivity monitoring system. The production line was being monitored by ABB Real-TPI, a factory information system that offers data collection and analysis to improve plant efficiency. Due to software limitations, the customer needed an OPC server and a corresponding I/O solution to collect data from additional sensor devices for the Real-TPI system. The goal is to enable the factory information system to more thoroughly collect data from every corner of the production line. This will improve its ability to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and translate into increased production efficiencies. System Requirements • Instant status updates while still consuming minimal bandwidth to relieve strain on limited factory networks • Interoperable with ABB Real-TPI • Small form factor appropriate for deployment where space is scarce • Remote software management and configuration to simplify operations
Case Study
How Sirqul’s IoT Platform is Crafting Carrefour’s New In-Store Experiences
Carrefour Taiwan’s goal is to be completely digital by end of 2018. Out-dated manual methods for analysis and assumptions limited Carrefour’s ability to change the customer experience and were void of real-time decision-making capabilities. Rather than relying solely on sales data, assumptions, and disparate systems, Carrefour Taiwan’s CEO led an initiative to find a connected IoT solution that could give the team the ability to make real-time changes and more informed decisions. Prior to implementing, Carrefour struggled to address their conversion rates and did not have the proper insights into the customer decision-making process nor how to make an immediate impact without losing customer confidence.
Case Study
Digital Retail Security Solutions
Sennco wanted to help its retail customers increase sales and profits by developing an innovative alarm system as opposed to conventional connected alarms that are permanently tethered to display products. These traditional security systems were cumbersome and intrusive to the customer shopping experience. Additionally, they provided no useful data or analytics.
Case Study
Ensures Cold Milk in Your Supermarket
As of 2014, AK-Centralen has over 1,500 Danish supermarkets equipped, and utilizes 16 operators, and is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. AK-Centralen needed the ability to monitor the cooling alarms from around the country, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each and every time the door to a milk cooler or a freezer does not close properly, an alarm goes off on a computer screen in a control building in southwestern Odense. This type of alarm will go off approximately 140,000 times per year, equating to roughly 400 alarms in a 24-hour period. Should an alarm go off, then there is only a limited amount of time to act before dairy products or frozen pizza must be disposed of, and this type of waste can quickly start to cost a supermarket a great deal of money.
Case Study
Supermarket Energy Savings
The client had previously deployed a one-meter-per-store monitoring program. Given the manner in which energy consumption changes with external temperature, hour of the day, day of week and month of year, a single meter solution lacked the ability to detect the difference between a true problem and a changing store environment. Most importantly, a single meter solution could never identify root cause of energy consumption changes. This approach never reduced the number of truck-rolls or man-hours required to find and resolve issues.