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Fox Network’s Engineering & Operations team was tasked with designing a file-based workflow solution for SPEED, specifically addressing the requirements to move from SD to HD content throughout the process, ingesting content directly into the Storage Area Network (SAN), creating low-res copies for easy editing, production and advanced editing, supporting Dalet transfers to and from video servers – while enabling 75 concurrent Dalet users to go about their everyday tasks, from logging content to rundown preparation. The team quickly began to leverage their experience from other, similar, projects and turned to high performance DDN® storage and Dalet for the key workflow components. The biggest challenge was timing – only a few weeks after signing the PO the entire system had to be on air in a brand new, purpose-built, 55,000 square foot facility.

Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada's largest university-based center for the study of film animation, film production, and film studies, faced several challenges. The school needed to update its aging workflows, moving from 90% film-oriented workflows to a 99% digital landscape. The technical support team was very limited in staffing. Multiple buildings on campus needed connectivity with third-party switches. Different client operating systems were attached to a single pool of storage.

Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing (WCSS) was facing challenges in supporting the processing and collection of increasingly large, complex, data-intensive scientific weather and geographic models. The temporary or scratch storage was required to address data growth across diverse scientific projects. The center needed to deliver access and capacity to support the work of over 3,000 scientists and researchers. There was an escalating need to address mixed workloads across a complicated, heterogeneous ecosystem of hardware and applications.

MLB Network, a 24/7 TV network for baseball fans, was facing challenges in managing its vast baseball video archive. The network required a high-performance disk cache to support tape migration for the archive while accommodating 7,000 hours of new content ingested weekly. They also needed to simplify complex, concurrent workflows to ensure seamless support for up to 40 post-production jobs concurrently. The network was also looking for a technology that could suit the needs of two sports TV networks. The immediate challenge was moving LTO-4 content into a disk cache and then rewriting that content onto T10KD tapes, while simultaneously recording and archiving new footage onto the T10KD platform.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Center in Perth, Western Australia, is one of the most powerful facilities in the Southern Hemisphere. It supports scientific breakthroughs in radio astronomy, energy resources, and engineering. At any given point, more than a thousand scientists rely on Pawsey’s state-of-the-art facilities to conduct data-intensive research, complex simulations, and advanced visualizations. The Center also plays a pivotal role in the trailblazing Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project, which focuses on building a next-generation radio telescope that will be more sensitive and powerful than today’s most advanced telescopes to survey the universe with incredible depth and speed. The SKA project will generate massive amounts of data from thousands of connected antennae, giving astronomers unprecedented insights into the formation of the universe. To support this ground-breaking research, Pawsey must provide scientists around the world with easy access to high-end computing platforms and resilient, scalable storage.

RXBAR was experiencing rapid growth and needed to make their shipping process more efficient and automated to keep up with demand. The company was relying on manual processes to put shipment bids out to their trucking partners, which often led to delays. Data was not always available to sales and customer service representatives when they needed it most. This hindered internal adoption of the company's new Salesforce CRM system, making it even more difficult to accurately assess and improve the sales and shipping process. RXBAR needed to provide all departments with a 360-degree view of the product across all systems.

Erin Goodall, vice president and director of compliance at Valliance Bank, was the sole member of the compliance team. She was responsible for analyzing all the bank’s fair lending data to identify redlining, disparities, and any potential violations of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and other laws. This was a time-consuming process, taking up to 96 hours per quarter, in addition to her general compliance responsibilities. She also had to decipher what the results meant and spent hours creating reports to explain the insights to the board, management, and compliance committees.

Bazaarvoice was in need of a monitoring solution that can support their evolving and decentralized approach to development. Scaling their existing monitoring systems would have required each team to not only host and manage their own observability tools, but also learn specific domain expertise in infrastructure monitoring. Bazaarvoice was already using a number of different monitoring solutions on their legacy systems. Scaling the existing monitoring systems would have required each team to not only run their own monitoring server, but also, to learn specific domain expertise in infrastructure monitoring. For Bazaarvoice, this would have involved more than 50 different monitoring servers, each with their own custom setup, metrics, and naming conventions. Maintaining easy and effective operations on such a disjointed system would have been nearly impossible for a team that was doubling in size every 6 to 9 months. Bazaarvoice required a monitoring solution that could support their evolving and decentralized approach to development.

As HATech scaled, they faced a challenge in managing and supporting a rapidly expanding pool of customers, especially those releasing changes to their software every few hours. Without an automated monitoring platform, they could not see into their customers’ infrastructure, and they were blind to potential problems. They needed a way to receive immediate alerts about any issues, and they needed real-time, detailed data to support rapid troubleshooting, even as customers’ infrastructure evolved day by day. They began a deep and thorough search for a monitoring platform that was fast, reliable, required no infrastructure management, offered flexibility to create custom add-ons, agents, and plug-ins, and was affordable.

Arriva, a leading provider of bus transport in the UK, recognized the importance of digital channels for customers' travel needs. They aimed to create an omnichannel experience, allowing customers to purchase tickets and plan their journeys in various ways. During the pandemic, Arriva accelerated the launch of its new app and website to keep customers moving safely and make digital the core of their travel experience. However, they faced a challenge in gaining visibility into the applications' front end to discover problems in real time and find precise solutions. Traditional monitoring solutions couldn't provide insights into the real-user experience, making it difficult to identify issues that were affecting conversions through the website.

Sensirion, a leading manufacturer of high-quality sensors and sensor solutions, was facing the challenge of monitoring information from multiple different sources due to the rapid speed of digitalization. The company had infrastructure across multiple sites and customers around the globe across multiple different time zones, making unifying Sensirion’s monitoring capabilities a complex task. The company was using a static legacy product with no auto-discovery and dependency recognition capabilities. Sensirion needed an enterprise IT platform that could help solve these problems with automation and built-in logic.

GCISD, a technology-forward district in Grapevine, Texas, with around 14,000 students and 1,800 staff, faced the challenge of managing an average of 40,000 devices online at any given time. The district had a 1:1 device policy and a BYOD policy, which led to the need for a secure observability platform that could provide best-in-class network monitoring, support all the technology systems they used every day, and offer robust alerting and forecasting systems to solve problems before they impacted teachers and students. Prior to using LogicMonitor, the district used several tools for monitoring networks and pulling logs, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Abrigo is a financial technology firm that provides software solutions to financial institutions in the financial crimes and credit and lending space. They offer their customers a robust product set, including hosting critical websites in their data centers. Operating in the financial technology space, Abrigo has seen the need to provide and support software through constant evolution and innovation to meet regulatory demands, especially as they grow to support larger financial institutions. When beginning the search for a unified observability and monitoring platform, Abrigo wanted to eliminate tool sprawl and reduce alert fatigue by finding a single solution that could help them improve uptime and customer experience while monitoring their diverse internal and customer infrastructures through a single pane of glass. Security was a top concern, as well as avoiding vendor lock-in. They needed a platform that would improve key metrics while providing more resilience and automation.

The healthcare provider was engaged in a major multi-year, multi-million dollar unified communications (UC) project. The IT team recognized that if the upgraded UC clusters were not fully tested under load, the system could be vulnerable to a range of failures, such as call drops and lack of dial-tone. Without real-time visibility and analysis in the production network, patient-impacting problems could persist far longer than would be acceptable. IT needed to verify and stress test the system in pre-production before go-live, to attain service assurance. A further goal was to put a solution in place that would allow IT to protect the performance of the new VoIP services post-deployment in the actual production environment. This solution would have to enable IT to proactively get ahead of issues before they impacted patients. At the same time, IT wanted to reduce number of vendors they manage, thereby reducing time lost to vendor finger pointing in its complex UC&C environments.

The U.S.-based global manufacturer was facing high operating expenses due to outdated data centers, costing millions per month. The company needed to consolidate its data centers, implement a software-defined networking solution (SDN), automate services, deploy applications faster, and introduce a cloud strategy to reduce operating expenses (OPEX). One of the biggest challenges was transitioning from four legacy to two new data centers within an extremely tight timeline. Any delays would negatively affect the ability to realize projected cost savings. In addition, the consolidated data center footprint would require an expedited ability to triage any problems. This could result in production services delays and the loss of millions of dollars.

The energy company was facing significant service assurance issues across multiple data centers and hundreds of remote branch offices. Degradations and slowdowns in customer-facing web-services like online access to outage maps, bill paying history and smart meter data were unacceptable. The inability to rapidly identify service availability issues associated with the company’s customer resource management (CRM) system, and pinpoint slowdowns in the customer portal for interactive power control, online bill pay and power outage reporting, left customer satisfaction at risk. Furthermore, any delay in the company’s ability to use their applications that track fleet vehicles for effective response to repair and upgrade orders exposes the company to higher expenses associated with staffing, service restoration and vehicle maintenance.

Turkcell’s customers demand superior 24/7/365 service, and achieving that level of service reliability is not easy. The lifeblood of Turkcell’s business is its service performance. If there is any customer-impacting service drop off, it eventually reverberates through to its bottom line. Turkcell’s primary ongoing challenge was that it needed a performance-monitoring tool that provides end-to-end visibility based on real-time, continuous traffic-based intelligence. It also needed to be able to pinpoint performance problems quickly to reduce Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK) and to maintain a flawless customer experience. LTE control plane monitoring, user plane visibility and session tracing must all be visible, as all are indispensable to ensuring and maintaining the exceptional quality service Turkcell subscribers have come to expect. Turkcell also needed customized reporting procedures coupled with real-time intelligence regarding its LTE signaling behavior. Turkcell’s approach is to solve problems proactively, not SERVICE PROVIDER reactively, before they are noticed in their network. So, proactive alarming of budding issues was a much-coveted service triage feature that Anil Ercan Sonmez of Turkcell Operations and his team members needed.

The Financial Services Company had selected the nGeniusONE service assurance platform and InfiniStream appliances to address quality and performance issues impacting their unified communications services at their distributed contact centers. As the IT team was implementing the equipment, they encountered several issues with the network traffic being forwarded by their third-party vendor’s packet brokers to the InfiniStream appliances. Trying to resolve the issues related to packet de-duplication became next to impossible due to product inefficiencies combined with poor customer support and insufficient knowledge from the equipment vendor. Recognizing that NETSCOUT® offered a broad selection of packet flow switch solutions, the IT staff accelerated their schedule for a technology refresh to meet their visibility needs.

The biggest challenge facing this organization was visibility into security threats attacking the business. As a payment processor and provider of financial transaction reconciliation, promptness in completing a request is an imperative. Anything impeding the availability of these services to their clients would be financially detrimental to both the clients and the SaaS provider, not to mention the reputation of the provider. Despite investing in security tools such as a web application firewall (WAF), a DDoS attack impeded access to critical business services for almost half a day. Customers were unable to process payments or reconcile financial transactions while the attack was ongoing. Even though no actual breach occurred, the downtime and reputational damage from an attack had a significant financial impact on the business. Even worse, the existing tools that the security team was using had not helped them detect or mitigate the attack. They needed a new solution that could provide both visibility and counter measures.

A regional telecommunications company was facing high costs for antenna adjustments. Every time an adjustment was needed, the company had to spend a minimum of $1,000 per tower climb. Additionally, tower crews billed $150 per hour when multiple adjustments were needed. This was a significant expense for the company and they were looking for a solution to reduce these costs.

The healthcare insurance provider was experiencing significant network slowdowns that were adversely impacting application services used for patient eligibility inquiries. These slowdowns were causing delays for doctors and hospitals in determining whether prescribed treatments were covered by insurance. This not only impacted patient care but also put the insurer at risk for service level agreement (SLA) violations. The IT team was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of these network slowdowns in order to rapidly triage and improve the mean time to repair (MTTR).

The insurance company was undergoing a company-wide migration to Microsoft Lync® IT and as it was rolling out, call quality issues began to appear. The IT staff was caught up in a classic multi-vendor finger pointing exercise as they failed to isolate the source of the issues to either Microsoft Lync servers, the Audio Codes gateway or yet another vendor’s gateway. The company faced further time lost and delays in problem resolution while the customers and service reps continued to suffer through poor call experiences.

The company had recently acquired a company with a cloud-based solution. However, the monitoring tool the acquired company was using for the cloud-based solution had gaps in capability and was very expensive to maintain and upgrade. The company needed the same visibility and analysis as they were successfully using for the on-premise solution. They needed the level of Unified Communication (UC) monitoring necessary to ensure the high-quality customer experiences the company traditionally delivered. Further, when a performance issue was reported, it was difficult, and sometimes impossible, to isolate the root cause. The company is undergoing a digital transformation and moving to software to take advantage of the speed and agility provided. The acquisition of the cloud-based solution is just the start of their cloud journey. Plans are in development to move other solutions to the cloud, making migration to the cloud a key investment priority. The IT team understands this will bring new layers of complexity and the risk of failure will multiply.

The healthcare organization was facing a delay in transitioning to a Cisco ACI environment due to a lack of visibility to completely identify all the applications and their dependencies that needed to be moved. The problem was further compounded by the complexity and inefficiencies created by multiple existing tools that were incomplete and disconnected, making it difficult for the teams to have common measurements, processes and reporting. The teams decided they needed to re-examine their network monitoring system and upgrade to the latest technologies to handle their requirements now and be positioned for future enhancements. They planned to implement high-quality network and application monitoring from their remote hospitals that have small VMware clusters, and deploy a new VoIP system. This brought up another challenge; ensuring that any solution they were going to implement met the needs of all the IT teams, i.e. Citrix, Voice, database, server, help-desk etc.

The energy company was implementing smart meters across its customer base and placed a significant emphasis on performance, particularly in preventing outages and service degradations to customers. However, the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) service, i.e. the smart meters, relied heavily on network communications, making the company’s back-end infrastructure and applications subject to performance issues. The IT team needed critical visibility into the company’s virtual servers, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and collection engines across distributed data centers, all without having to move between different tools. After the AMI project was implemented, IT faced pressure to improve their troubleshooting abilities for several other business application services including Microsoft Office 365, the Outage Management System (OMS) and Crew Management System. The company needed to ensure quality VoIP services - especially from remote sites and the customer facing contact centers.

The pharmaceutical company was facing network visibility blind spots that were compromising cross-business IT success. They had issues with Unified Communications and Cisco UCS performance transparency. The company had made the strategic decision to deploy open compute technology that offered their organization increased deployment flexibility, as well as associated reductions in both capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX). Management has also established an organizational goal deploying one common performance analytics platform for use across its many information technology (IT) teams. The time came to update their service assurance and packet broker hardware. In response, the company’s satisfied its open compute platform technology goals by earlier selecting the NETSCOUT® “smart data, smarter analytics” approach, which factors a software-based appliance versus traditional hardware solution.

The North American transit authority was facing a fare processing issue that was impacting the ability for riders to automatically “re-load” their fare payment cards at station kiosks. This problem was causing inconvenience to the riders and was affecting the reputation of the transit authority. The IT team was unable to identify the root cause of the issue due to lack of visibility into the fare system’s financial application and underlying technology. The IT team was looking for a solution that would improve network visibility and real-time application monitoring, while extending the value of their legacy IT toolsets.

The financial services provider identified Microsoft Azure as their organizational cloud services platform. The project was a critical undertaking for IT, involving business service & application migrations from numerous data centers to Azure Cloud services across their three geographic regions. The IT leadership team wanted to enhance the security of this solution, which led them to utilize Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, which extended the company’s on-premises network segments into Azure Cloud services using a private connection. As the IT teams worked to establish highbandwidth routers required to support the secure network connection associated with migrating large-scale, business-essential workloads to Azure ExpressRoute, they began seeing performance issues at one of the company’s data centers.

The Flint Boys and Girls Club was in need of a new video surveillance system. Their previous system was aging and lacked the image quality and zoom capabilities they desired. The club serves a large number of children daily, making it crucial to have a reliable surveillance system to ensure their safety. The club had expanded their old system to 16 cameras, covering more areas, but the quality was not up to par.

Junior Achievement of South Florida’s (JASF) JA World is the largest Junior Achievement facility in the world. Each day, 450 students participate in JA BizTown and JA Finance Park simulations at JA World. Their safety and the safety of volunteers, staff, and guests is of utmost concern to JASF. The initial security system included remotely managed access control, verified audio intrusion detection, and analog cameras. However, with time it was clear JASF needed to bring more areas inside and outside the building under surveillance, they wanted more cutting-edge IP camera technology, and to have all cameras under one Video Management System.