Cisco Case Studies OPNET and Ixia Solution Improves Network Application with Network Visibility

	OPNET and Ixia Solution Improves Network Application with Network Visibility Cisco

OPNET and Ixia Solution Improves Network Application with Network Visibility

Cisco

Technology Category	Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries	Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions	Business Operation
Challenge	Networked applications, such as electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR), are vital for Cook Children’s to provide outstanding service to its patients and physicians. As its network grew in complexity, with data coming in from various wireless medical devices and wearables, as well as remote hosted applications, issues surfaced. The organization’s network manager identified a range of issues that included slow user experience, network monitoring challenges, and an inability to proactively identify application performance concerns. Read More
About Customer	- Read More
Customer Name	Cook Children’s Healthcare System Read More
Solution	After a careful search of alternatives, Ixia’s Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) was implemented between network access points to enhance network traffic visibility for the APM platform. OPNET AppResponse Xpert was selected to meet the APM requirements. • APM—The OPNET APM Xpert suite enabled 24x7 application transaction monitoring, packet storage, and network analysis, while providing integrated software add-ons for dependency mapping, SNMP reporting, database monitoring, and pre-deployment application testing. • Aggregation and Filtering—The Ixia NTO was implemented to aggregate traffic from the multiple 10G SPANs and direct it to the OPNET appliance after filtering out duplicate packets. “The NTO makes it extremely easy and efficient to provide our OPNET AppResponse Xpert all the traffic it needs from anywhere in our data center,” said Ross Jones, Network Manager at Cook Children’s Health. “Removing unneeded duplicate packets was a huge benefit.” Read More Log in to view content
Data Collected	Network Performance (bits/s), Electronic Medical Record, Network Traffic Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software

Applicable Industries

Healthcare & Hospitals

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Challenge

Networked applications, such as electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR), are vital for Cook Children’s to provide outstanding service to its patients and physicians. As its network grew in complexity, with data coming in from various wireless medical devices and wearables, as well as remote hosted applications, issues surfaced. The organization’s network manager identified a range of issues that included slow user experience, network monitoring challenges, and an inability to proactively identify application performance concerns.

About Customer

Customer Name

Cook Children’s Healthcare System

Solution

After a careful search of alternatives, Ixia’s Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) was implemented between network access points to enhance network traffic visibility for the APM platform. OPNET AppResponse Xpert was selected to meet the APM requirements.

• APM—The OPNET APM Xpert suite enabled 24x7 application transaction monitoring, packet storage, and network analysis, while providing integrated software add-ons for dependency mapping, SNMP reporting, database monitoring, and pre-deployment application testing.

• Aggregation and Filtering—The Ixia NTO was implemented to aggregate traffic from the multiple 10G SPANs and direct it to the OPNET appliance after filtering out duplicate packets. “The NTO makes it extremely easy and efficient to provide our OPNET AppResponse Xpert all the traffic it needs from anywhere in our data center,” said Ross Jones, Network Manager at Cook Children’s Health. “Removing unneeded duplicate packets was a huge benefit.”

Data Collected

Network Performance (bits/s), Electronic Medical Record, Network Traffic

Impact #1	[Efficiency Improvement - Issue Response] Faster troubleshooting – problem isolation reduced from days to hours • Proactively seeing and resolving issues before they become problems. • Complete network traffic visibility for application performance analysis. • Improving efficiency of APM system by removing duplicate packets. • No interference with other department’s network probes thanks to SPAN/Tap sharing.
Impact #2	[Efficiency Improvement - Maintenance] Before the APM deployment, the networking team would often not be aware of slow response times on the remotely hosted Electronic Medical Records (EMR) application until a physician would call in to complain.Once the problem was identified, it took time to sort out if the root cause of the issue was the application or the network. This issue was resolved by baselining and continuously monitoring WAN network latency. Thresholds were set using OPNET’s alert functionality so that the networking team can be aware of and correct potential issues before users complain. When problems do occur, the mean time to repair (MTTR) is reduced by focused root cause analysis.

Impact #1

[Efficiency Improvement - Issue Response]
Faster troubleshooting – problem isolation reduced from days to hours • Proactively seeing and resolving issues before they become problems. • Complete network traffic visibility for application performance analysis. • Improving efficiency of APM system by removing duplicate packets. • No interference with other department’s network probes thanks to SPAN/Tap sharing.

Impact #2

[Efficiency Improvement - Maintenance]
Before the APM deployment, the networking team would often not be aware of slow response times on the remotely hosted Electronic Medical Records (EMR) application until a physician would call in to complain.Once the problem was identified, it took time to sort out if the root cause of the issue was the application or the network. This issue was resolved by baselining and continuously monitoring WAN network latency. Thresholds were set using OPNET’s alert functionality so that the networking team can be aware of and correct potential issues before users complain. When problems do occur, the mean time to repair (MTTR) is reduced by focused root cause analysis.

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Overview

OPNET and Ixia Solution Improves Network Application with Network Visibility

Operational Impact