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The agency's Information Technology (IT) team places paramount importance on maintaining the integrity and availability of the R&D environment supporting the activities of their researchers. The legacy technology located in the primary data center provides log management and packet forensics analysis, with IT also deploying a mix of packet brokers to pass traffic to their network and security tools. The agency wanted to transform this approach to encompass a proactive network, application, and cybersecurity monitoring framework that also leveraged their existing technology investments. The agency’s Cybersecurity team contacted a range of industry-leading service assurance and cyber threat/DDoS protection providers to identify a next-generation solution. The agency had tight budget limitations for this project and encouraged vendors to sharpen their pencils when submitting price proposals.

The energy company was embarking on several migration projects to support their digital transformation for improved customer experience. These included migrating applications to Microsoft Azure, upgrading their Contact Center to a SIP VoIP platform, and modernizing the data center to leaf/spine architecture. The company has a large, diverse network with multiple Data Centers, over 200 physical locations, a multitude of virtual servers, and hundreds of Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications. All of this is managed and supported by distributed IT teams, some of whom do not have in-depth network experience. With even more cloud and virtual environments being added, they needed to address any potential silos that would create difficulty identifying the root cause of an issue.

The company opened a new corporate headquarters campus in the US that brings together thousands of employees from all the multiple business units, in a world-class facility designed to foster communication and collaboration. The employees are tasked with addressing global business challenges, and the campus IT network is designed for high volumes of network traffic between the many buildings and with the corporate data center. Once all the campus buildings were fully staffed, the company experienced inter-building communication problems. Since the campus houses many business units, it is critical that they each have reliable access to all the other buildings, as well as the the datacenters, to communicate and share systems. IT needed a simple way to verify and monitor this complex grid of access points. After a vendor completed a fiber upgrade, users in some buildings were experiencing intermittent degradations with some applications. It was difficult to pinpoint the problem because only certain buildings’ traffic was affected at certain times. This negatively impacted user’s productivity when they could not access a critical application, while users in other buildings could access.

As the company grew, the upgrades, additions, and expansions of their data centers, contact centers, and remote branches increased the network complexities for the IT teams. The team was relegated to using a combination of legacy tools that were both ineffective and left gaps in visibility. This exposed the organization to the potential for severe issues to arise that could not be resolved before they impacted end-user employees and customers. IT needed to quickly migrate newly acquired locations to the company standard infrastructure architecture for visibility, consistent processes, and ease of troubleshooting. That infrastructure had to be updated to include the latest management and monitoring technologies. The addition of many more remote branch locations providing service to their most high-value clients, brought an urgency to ensure and improve access and performance of their access to critical business applications.

The communications company was tasked with managing the wireless access at a high-profile, multi-day sporting event with international media coverage. They needed to ensure a flawless experience for the event staff and attendees, who depended on the availability of online information and wanted to follow event details from their mobile devices. However, they lacked visibility across the entire wireless access network and their existing tools did not alert them when there was an issue. They needed a solution for proactive monitoring of access and performance to quickly address user-impacting issues as they occurred during the event.

DQE Communications, a leading provider of commercial fiber optic networking to businesses in southwestern Pennsylvania, was facing a challenge of insufficient visibility into their network. This was affecting their operational readiness and plans for continued expansion. As the company grew, it realized that it did not have the necessary tools to protect its growing network and customers against the increasing risk of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The lack of visibility into network traffic was a significant issue that needed to be addressed to ensure the security and reliability of their services.

ZTV, a cable television, Internet, and landline telephone service provider in Japan, was facing challenges in maintaining network stability due to increasing DDoS attacks. The company's existing flow collector was unable to accurately detect traffic volume due to the server being overloaded by a large number of small packets. This lack of network stability was jeopardizing customer satisfaction. As the network quality requirements were becoming higher every year, there was a rapid increase in the need for visualization of DDoS attacks, in addition to traffic monitoring and analysis.

The company needed to optimize application performance and reduce service degradation in a highly complex environment comprised of data centers, co-locations and clouds. This challenge was compounded by the high volume of disparate data being gathered by a collection of siloed monitoring tools used by different IT teams, offering no context and a failure to provide common situational awareness. As a result, the IT organization faced visibility blind spots in the company’s infrastructure, making it problematic to improve performance as well as detect and investigate security issues, all of which dramatically increased risk for the business. Without end-to-end visibility, the IT team was unable to solve problems quickly. For a company whose entire go-to-market business model is tied to electronic access, performance, and availability, service disruptions of any type could mean significant loss in revenue, customer confidence, industry reputation, not to mention possible regulatory compliance issues and fines.

Banpará, a retail bank in Brazil, was facing a significant challenge as it sought to expand its network. The bank's ambitious expansion plans required a technology update. With an extensive network of its own, the bank needed proactive monitoring to prevent service issues. The bank's growth and the nature of today's financial market required technological controls that far surpassed the resources of Banpará's legacy systems. In order to maintain the availability of the bank's services as well as uninterrupted and secure IP communications, Banpará needed to update its infrastructure. They were in the market for a less reactive and more proactive monitoring structure.

The metropolitan police agency was facing a challenge of upgrading and consolidating their data center with a new Cisco ACI SDN architecture. The agency uses NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to continuously monitor high-speed fiber connections running from data centers to the city’s police stations. However, network and application performance delays are unacceptable in any enterprise environment. For police officers on the front lines, however, performance anomalies in the radio network or crucial laptop law enforcement applications can truly translate to life-and-death matters. The agency’s Network Operations team made the strategic decision to take advantage of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) solution to simplify their future data center operations. This solution enables the agency to support a new generation of distributed applications over existing physical and virtualized environments. Simultaneously, they planned to consolidate data center operations.

The agency had been relying on a legacy Wide-Area Network (WAN) for years for the delivery of high-value streaming video activities. While the WAN provided reliability, it presented long-term issues in terms of maintenance, support, and security. The agency decided to transition their transport video network to a platform running on Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology. The new solution needed to deliver as good, if not better, network and application performance, security, and video monitoring capabilities than the WAN.

The global fashion retailer was facing frequent outages and slowdowns within their e-commerce site, as well as issues affecting point-of-sale (POS) payment authorizations. These issues threatened to harm the reputation of the business and negatively impact company revenues. The network operations team was struggling with chronic network outages and high mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). The homegrown monitoring tools lacked sufficient visibility into application, network, and VoIP performance, leaving IT in a bind. Retail store operations and supply chain partners were being adversely affected, leaving IT spending too much time in the war room trying to uncover the root cause of the issues.

Following a recent acquisition, the hospitality corporation faced the challenge of delivering service assurance across two different data center environments to ensure vital services were always on. This meant effectively monitoring private data centers and new third-party cloud-based data centers, as well as the company’s website and reservation applications that were running 24/7. Any degradations and outages could result in millions in lost revenue in a matter of minutes. The IT team was under pressure to find a viable solution.

The agency had been modernizing their digital environment and had recently upgraded to 40GB segments in the core of their data centers. The existing packet brokers they had been using for years on the 10GB segments were nearing end of life and were unable to be upgraded to support the new high-speed links. The network operations team needed a more sophisticated solution that had greater capacity, enhanced features, and capture speeds. As a customer-facing entity, any service interruption, downtime, or security event could result in revenue loss, damage to their reputation, and a loss of confidence from their consumers. Furthermore, when employees are unable to rapidly access and process customer requests and transactions across the network, employee productivity goes down and customer service suffers with fewer requests completed during a given period of time. The agency’s IT team was focused on ensuring that as they executed on the strategic plan to modernize the IT infrastructure, the monitoring tools they depended on were not left behind and were properly upgraded and/or replaced.

The gaming company was opening a new international facility in Asia and anticipated the need for visibility into the traffic throughout the network of this facility. The company aimed to provide a high-quality user experience for its gamers by monitoring the performance of services in each facility to stay ahead of emerging issues. However, the packet broker technology that had been deployed in other offices had become prohibitively expensive. The capital cost for these hardware-based units was much more costly than comparable software models, and even the maintenance costs on the legacy units were becoming exorbitant.

The financial services organization, a long-time NETSCOUT® customer, was facing a challenge as the company grew and a new datacenter was needed to meet modern expanding needs. NetOps was responsible for ensuring high quality end user experience and needed a solution to restore end-to-end visibility within the new datacenter design. Virtualized environments increased the difficulty in ensuring visibility at the access level. As part of the launch of the new datacenter, security policies were tightened up, and a new policy was put in place requiring all access to production environments to go through one of two isolated DMZ’s. This created a big challenge for IT. Customers and employees of this organization rely on critical applications and business services for important functions to drive business revenue, including Citrix XenApp published desktops, Oracle, and an in-house dealer financing application published over Citrix.

The Department of Human Services (DHS) agency was facing several IT challenges, including ongoing issues that required time-consuming war room sessions to resolve. The agency was also dealing with budget limitations and a drive to modernize. The IT team was managing numerous third-party solutions across dispersed government agency delivery environments, leading to a lot of finger-pointing when service issues surfaced. The lack of end-to-end visibility presented other IT challenges. For example, the IT team was expected to address response time inconsistencies for a server located in a data center being used as a common facility. The agency also needed to deploy additional network taps to help monitor traffic entering the agency data center.

The Federal agency, a long-time NETSCOUT customer, was building and deploying a new data center. As part of the planned data center launch, the agency made the decision to migrate to a 40 GbE switching core. They determined they needed to reduce the load on their switching infrastructure and move away from their reliance on SPANs for on-demand troubleshooting of problem ports on the switch. Taps would provide the desired visibility. However, this presented further challenges in ensuring their monitoring solution would be supportive of much higher-speed backbone, as well as continuous monitoring for post-event troubleshooting and trending & capacity planning.

The IT Agency of a large County Department of Social Services (DSS) was facing performance issues with a new custom application for case management and benefits eligibility. The application was developed by a commercial provider and was critical for the DSS managers and case workers processing benefits cases for recipients. Any delays in processing welfare benefits delivery could cause families in need to unnecessarily “go without.” After initial deployment, the custom application began experiencing performance problems that could not be resolved by DSS or the commercial provider. The commercial provider identified the County WAN managed by the IT Agency as the culprit of the application performance issues. This led to an inter-organizational collaboration effort between the IT Agency and DSS to identify the cause of the custom application performance issue.

The multinational financial services organization was facing a major challenge with the migration of their banking partners to TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2. To ensure compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the organization’s Security team needed a way to ensure that they were receiving TLS 1.2 certificates from their partner banks. Failure to comply with PCI DSS requirements could result in up to $100,000 in fines every month that a company was found to not be in compliance. This concern impacted every financial transaction they processed, so it was very important. They also needed a way to see the performance of these secured transactions, and to be able to respond quickly if there was an encryption issue, for the security and protection of their end users. Beyond this security concern, the application and network teams needed general end-to-end visibility on premises and in the cloud to see all revenue generating transactions, to validate and ensure SLA compliance. If there was an issue with a particular transaction, it was imperative to understand if the problem was with the organization, their partner bank, the merchant, or the consumer, all parties involved in the transaction. Getting this wrong could cost the business money.

The organization is responsible for a complex voice and video communications deployment. The UC and Call Center applications alone come from four different vendors. The deployment serves multiple locations and is spread across a Hybrid Cloud environment. When issues occurred, the first step in problem resolution was too often finger pointing between the various application and network providers. While the organization needed to hold vendors accountable for issues, relying on them to determine a root cause was problematic. First, diagnosis was more time consuming than necessary. Second, supplying the level of network access required to diagnose problems raised security concerns.

The U.S. Government Agency, focused on research & development (R&D) activities, was facing challenges with their network upgrade to 100G speeds. Their existing packet flow switches and downstream monitoring devices were not equipped to handle these new speeds and higher traffic volumes. The agency was also using 200G uplinks/ports, and the Network team had new, associated packet conditioning requirements involving de-duplication and packet slicing. All these changes were occurring in a network environment where the slightest network latency is an issue – even 1 millisecond delays are unacceptable to this agency. The agency needed a technology refresh to handle increased network speeds and advanced packet conditioning requirements.

The European Government agency was facing network traffic issues that were preventing it from complying with the government's data retention guidelines. Their internally developed packet streaming solution was not keeping pace with the increasing network traffic volumes entering their data center. This led to packet drops and inconsistent data retention. The agency needed to upgrade their homegrown packet capture technology to monitor all incoming wide area network (WAN) traffic, which was ranging from 4GBit/s to 10GBit/s. As a publicly funded organization, the agency had to use a government-standard tender process to solicit proposals from several identified vendors.

Forte Data Solutions, a company that delivers professional services, managed services and integrated technology offerings to address complex data challenges, decided to migrate many of their application workloads to AWS to benefit from the elasticity of the AWS cloud. However, after migrating application workloads to AWS, the end-users of the company’s web-based statistical application started to experience slowdowns when running queries, instability and intermittent freezes within the application, and timeouts while creating reports. These issues made the overall user experience far more difficult, ultimately frustrating end-users and costing the company lost revenue. The overall load of the application was continuously growing, causing frequent CloudWatch alarms to be raised, and making monitoring essentially unusable. In addition, database backups were delayed, while some were outright failing.

The healthcare organization needed visibility within and between their geographically distributed primary and back up data centers to assure performance and availability of all their clinical and business application services. They had concerns about application performance assurance of Epic electronic health records used by doctors and nurses, visibility to troubleshoot issues in their unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) services for both voice and call setup protocols, particularly for SIP Trunking, and analysis of how the healthcare’s physical network was supporting traffic originating from the wireless network. The CTO also wanted to ensure the solution would serve them well into the future for visibility as they moved into SaaS and Cloud environments.

The branch of the United States Military was engaged in a major, multi-year data center and digital transformation initiative that touched many aspects of their infrastructure design. With multiple major data centers, 100 remote facilities, migration of key services to Amazon AWS GovCloud, as well as thousands of remote users, providing consistent high-quality availability to critical application services was no small task. Broad, comprehensive, end-to-end application visibility was needed to identify and troubleshoot disruptions, track performance before, during, and after migrations to new data center technologies and /or to the cloud, map service dependencies, and trend end-user experience from all their global locations to the data centers and cloud services to ensure uniformity in security and quality service delivery.

The defense agencies of a European country were facing challenges with their expanding network topology and speed requirements for military purposes. They also needed to increase data storage for forensic activities and data encryption for enhanced government security mandates. The IT provider had to comply with policies regarding the monitoring approaches used to support sensitive military business. These guidelines applied to post-incident troubleshooting, which relegated the IT provider’s troubleshooting to a reactive approach reliant on network packet captures for off-line forensic analysis. The military also prioritized the use of additional safeguards, including mandatory data encryption in the communications environment. These challenges made gaining the visibility necessary to manage the performance of these networks even more complex.

The school district, the largest in its state, was faced with the challenge of ensuring a high-quality learning experience for students and faculty during remote and hybrid learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The district had implemented a transformative software-defined network leveraging Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) with a sophisticated spine and leaf design. However, the sudden shift to remote learning presented new challenges. The district had to ensure that all students, from early elementary grades onwards, had the same educational experience as always, but now it had to be delivered digitally. The district had to provide remote learning to a wide variety of end-user devices, for both students and teachers. The district also had to ensure that services among teachers and administration, including Cisco Jabber, Cisco WebEx, and Microsoft Office 365, delivered over VPN, were highly responsive and available. The district's Student Information System (SIS), Infinite Campus, used for web-based K-12 student management services, had to perform optimally to provide real-time access to student, parent, and teacher portals for administration, instruction, communication, curriculum, and reporting.

The healthcare provider was preparing for a new infrastructure equipment implementation and had concerns about the switch vendor’s ability to deliver specified performance. This was crucial for achieving service assurance for IT. After a recent implementation, IT began to experience issues with ports on the newly deployed switches tied to failures attributed to the small form factor pluggable (SFP) transceivers. The existing networking monitoring solution wasn’t able to detect the failures that were causing server performance degradations. The data center engineers recognized the need to validate their fiber cables and SFPs in order to isolate failures. Effective network analysis was required to identify port level errors.

The customer, a leading provider of wireless voice and data services with over 90 million mobile subscribers, was evolving its current 3G network with the deployment of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) architecture for delivering high-speed mobile data services to its customers. In parallel, it was deploying IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) components to support the delivery of innovative services for its LTE customers. Due to the requirement for high availability and the high performance demands of the IMS core network, it was important for this service provider to have an intelligent, early warning system that would alert on any performance degradation that could affect user experience. In addition, this system needed to provide rapid assessment of the location, severity and impact of any problems with service delivery as well as provide a clear path to determining root cause.