State IT Teams Improve Service in Managing Increased Network and Application Demands with NETSCOUT

The State’s IT team was experiencing an annual 30% increase in network traffic due to an increase in users and applications. The IT Help Desk required Network Operations Level 2 & 3 forensic triage support for issues that could not be resolved by in-place tools. There was also an expanding need for remote “do-it-yourself” network analysis by local agency technicians. The Network Operations team was increasingly challenged to answer Help Desk calls related to troubleshooting specific network and application performance issues that could not be addressed by in-place third-party solutions. Such requests frequently required leveraging days of wire traffic for packet-level forensic analysis. In addition, with the expanse of the respective agency functions and the geographic locations being served by the IT organization, the Network Operations team saw growing requests for certain network troubleshooting services to be coordinated by local IT resources directly employed by respective agencies.

The customer in this case study is an Information Technology (IT) team that manages a large-scale network and applications environment supporting service delivery for an entire state, including more than 40 state and local agencies. The State’s 200-member IT team incorporates Network Operations, Network Services, Hosted Application, and Voice subject matter experts. Those collective IT resources support the network, application, virtual, and voice performance technology needs for both financial and human services government departments, including the Juvenile Justice System, the State Comptroller, and Health & Human services agency. The State’s network operations backbone is delivered using a primary data center and nearby disaster recovery (DR) configuration, with the Network Operations team based in the data center.