Retailer Assures E-Commerce Website Performance with NETSCOUT

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.

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.