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The home fashion retailer faced a challenge in effectively monitoring network uptime and ensuring the delivery of critical voice and data applications and services. Network congestion issues were interfering with application performance in both production and backup data centers. If a buying office or distribution center went offline, the cost to the business was millions of dollars every hour that it was down. The IT team was tasked with monitoring network uptime and ensuring availability of mission-critical applications and services even in failover situations. Network congestion issues and lack of bandwidth, which interfered with application performance, presented a particularly vexing problem for the team. In addition, vitally important voice services were impacted, causing IT to literally pull their hair out trying to identify the root cause of the issues.

The healthcare organization faced a major challenge when a natural disaster came uncomfortably close to one of their data centers. This prompted the IT organization to augment their existing business continuity plans. The organization needed to ensure that doctors and members had up-to-date access to patients’ records and a patient portal for information from the hospital Electronic Medical Records (EMR), even if the primary data center was unavailable for any reason. The major challenge was how to efficiently and effectively replicate the EMR applications and other existing information in the redundant data center. They needed to consider both the initial transfer and the subsequent daily updates.

The State agency was facing several challenges with its IT infrastructure. The agency had recently deployed a new data center, which had enhanced network connection speeds, additional visibility points, and a new Unified Communications (UC) Center/VoIP deployment. However, the IT teams were facing service outage and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) resolution issues that were impacting important government services. The agency was generating 450 network-related incident tickets per month, and the overall MTTR rates were higher than desired. Delays in resolving downtime issues in revenue-generating departments were exposing them to thousands of dollars in lost opportunity. Other government service delivery platforms supported by the agency’s IT team were experiencing similar downtime instances, which adversely impacted service delivery to end users and citizens.

The large Western U.S. electric utility was facing difficulty in ensuring service performance with GOOSE protocol, used for power switching, between data centers and substations. The IT team was under pressure to meet NERC-CIP compliance for safety and security with audit trails of servers and ports. Failure to assure NERC-CIP compliance could result in fines up to a million dollars per day. The IT team needed to ensure message transmissions remained within the acceptable latency range to maintain safety in power transmission. They also faced the critical challenge of ensuring the performance of its Energy Management System (EMS) on the transmission network, as well the performance of general business applications on its enterprise network.

The company had embarked on a strategic initiative to move hundreds of application services to the public cloud. Due to the importance of availability and responsiveness of their business applications, they developed a dual-cloud strategy with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and another cloud provider to host key business applications. The network infrastructure team had long advocated network performance management solutions to troubleshoot issues as they were reported. It was their mandate to ensure they had the same or better visibility and performance management resources as they moved services to the cloud. As their current troubleshooting tool, as well as their existing packet flow switches, were out of date and unable to be extended to the cloud, it became an imperative for the IT organization to find a new solution that would fulfill their need for visibility throughout their new hybrid cloud environment.

The company was experiencing on‑going issues with their CRM system at many of their locations. Slow performance and outages were causing customers to experience delays on calls and when using the online portal to manage their account and pay their bill. The 3rd party CRM vendor reported the issues were most likely due to network latency and that should be evaluated first. A separate issue was occurring at remote locations where employees accessed 3rd party Cloud applications via Wi‑Fi connection. The user experience was not consistent, with some users enjoying immediate access and quick response times and others reporting delayed access and slow response times.

PETRONAS Dagangan Berhad, a subsidiary of Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS), is a leading oil and gas multinational in Malaysia. The company operates over 1,000 petrol stations and 725 convenience stores, offering a range of services from fuel to dining and banking. To maintain its market leadership, PETRONAS recognized the need for a proactive solution to detect and troubleshoot issues with its point-of-sale (POS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and logistics applications before they impacted customers. Prior to implementing a proactive monitoring solution, PETRONAS was unable to detect and correct IT service degradations, which could negatively impact customer experience. With over 1,000 remote locations and multiple applications interfacing with central data centers over the telco network, pinpointing disruptions became a significant challenge. PETRONAS needed a solution that could provide visibility across the entire environment to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) when problems were detected.

The financial services sector is undergoing a significant digital transformation, driven by advanced computing and analytics, omni-channel service delivery, government mandates, and blockchaining. The industry is grappling with how to best utilize the Internet of Things (IoT), which could potentially impact ATM and mobile banking. The financial industry is also facing the challenge of meeting the fast-paced customer expectations set by digital service processes like Netflix and iTunes. Customers now expect all services to be delivered quickly and flawlessly, and financial institutions must integrate web, mobile, phone, and in-person services like never before. Additionally, the industry is facing challenges related to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). By 2017, it is predicted that the typical IT organization will spend up to 30% of its budget on GRC and security.

The health care industry is facing the third evolutionary wave of IT with implications so profound analysts believe it is a new era of global computing. Digital Transformation (DX) will be galvanized by foundational technologies such as mobility, Internet of Things (IoT), Web 3.0, PaaS/SaaS, Big Data and Unified Communications (UC). During the next 10 years, a “digital thread” will unleash a seamless flow of data ranging from health care records and systems to patients interacting with care teams at any time and from anywhere. The shift from relying on physical assets to digital assets in the industry’s value chain is happening now, and its impact in the future will have more significance – and opportunities – than ever before. In addition, there are practical challenges to achieving a robust and functioning digital future.

TELUS, one of Canada’s largest national telecommunications companies, faced several challenges in maintaining and enhancing the end-user experience. The company operates three different networks founded on four different technologies, and the demands on their network infrastructure were significant and intensifying as consumer technology evolved. Even the slightest degradation of service, such as with smartphone call latency, could result in loss of subscribers and revenue. TELUS required complete, end-to-end network visibility of all services. Specific challenges included overseeing and monitoring LTE signaling and user-plane traffic, monitoring domain name system (DNS) and call tracing, proactively and transparently troubleshooting infrastructure issues, diminishing mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), and establishing a proactive, early-warning network monitoring process and system.

Netcontroll, a full-service network, telecommunications, and IT security consultant based in Mexico City, faced challenges in service triage for its clientele and for the company itself. The businesses and organizations they serviced relied on silo-specific performance monitoring tools, which had a domain-specific focus and thus couldn't see the whole service delivery environment. This resulted in a lack of operational visibility and vastly increased mean time to knowledge (MTTK) of service problems. Inefficient workflows from the IT team members led to extended time spent in the war room troubleshooting incidents and service disruptions, increased mean time to resolution (MTTR), and diminished staff productivity. As a result, capital and operational expenditures grew significantly.

The agribusiness company, a leading player in the food and agriculture business, faced a fundamental challenge of managing its large network while providing high-quality services and implementing service triage resolution transparently. This was a constant, unending problem and the driving force behind the organization’s network management and service optimization plans. The company required extraordinary L2-L7 service performance insight. Overseeing a large network was a fundamental challenge for the agribusiness giant. Most importantly, the challenge for the company was related to service assurance.

The federal government agency is a massive enterprise with a sprawling IT infrastructure. It has over 617,000 employees and handles more than 3.5 million emails per day. Its Unified Communications (UC) capacity hosts 85,000 meetings per month, representing more than 26 million minutes of conference time per year. The agency's computer network links more than 32,000 facilities performing two billion scans a day, and its centralized supercomputing capability processes data from each product piece within 50 to 100 milliseconds. The agency's website had more than 4 billion page views in 2014 alone with more than 3.9 million unique visitors to its home page, and oversaw 3.3 million in online product sales. The communications network supports and maintains more than 168,000 computers, 310,000 hand-held scanners, 81,000 printers, 12,500 smart phones. The unrelenting daily demands made on its sprawling network and systems resulted in inevitable service performance issues with lots of time spent in the war room per incident.

Fidelity Investments, a multinational financial services giant, faced significant challenges in managing its IT infrastructure. With operations spanning the globe and over 20,000 clients and institutions to service, the company's IT infrastructure had to be robust and provide seamless backend support. The company's online discount brokerage business operation alone has over 140 locations scattered throughout the US, and its website tallies over 21 million unique visitors per month. Moreover, this business-critical information must be accessible 24/7 to not only investors but to other critical internal and external stakeholders as well. Furthermore, information within accounts must be current with up-to-the-minute pricing and financial data. Reliable and integrated communications are also mandatory within the organization and are actually required by the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulation. Beyond the practical requirements of always-on, trouble-free, customer-facing applications, the company’s brand and reputation could be at risk with a publicly-known outage of service. Indeed, in the highly competitive world of financial services, customer service – and services – is paramount. Any semblance of degraded service to its customers will diminish the brand Fidelity has worked so diligently to cultivate.

The large enterprise telecommunications services company was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They found that using a single service-oriented performance management platform was the most effective solution. The company agreed that the top reason for purchasing NETSCOUT solutions was to optimize the performance of their IT services.

The large enterprise health care company was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They found that a single service-oriented approach was the most effective option. The company considered various vendors including CA, Splunk, NetQoS, HP, Aternity, and Extrahop before selecting the NETSCOUT solution to solve critical IT challenges like reducing degradations and outages.

The company was preparing to roll out a new Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to provide more detailed billing for their customers as well as detect degradations and outages, allowing faster response without customers reporting incidents. In addition, the AMI implementation would improve customer service by giving customers access to their usage information online. Armed with own analytics, customers could better understand and control their energy usage for things like heat, air conditioning, appliances and general consumption. In addition, the AMI implementation was key to maintaining the company’s good reputation as outages over a certain magnitude must be reported by federal compliance standards. IT needed to validate their ability to manage the AMI proactively in pre-production to ensure they would not risk internal or customer-facing problems. It was critical to validate the ability to proactively understand if there were problems with data from the smart meters in the AMI not coming through the gateways in the data centers prior to production deployment.

The government agency was using the nGeniusONE service assurance platform in their centralized data center locations. However, they encountered problems troubleshooting issues that extended between their data centers and their regional offices. The tools deployed in the regional locations lacked the necessary depth to pinpoint the source of the problem and were unable to interoperate with nGeniusONE at headquarters. When issues involving Oracle database services or Microsoft Exchange services occurred, the IT team was challenged to follow the problem across the full communications path of the enterprise. The Director of Data Center operations was frustrated as his team lacked holistic visibility to perform end-to-end troubleshooting and service assurance. Furthermore, managing multiple tools and vendors was inefficient for his team, physically maintaining operation of numerous platforms and also paying for maintenance contracts with all the vendors.

The U.S. division of a global auto manufacturer embarked on a data center consolidation effort with the goal of lowering risk and decreasing time-to-market with Cloud and application deployments. They needed to deploy new application services faster, reducing the rollout of new services from four months down to one day. Another major challenge was to assure performance of the design and build application services across a distributed infrastructure where all production facilities had to connect back to the data center. Failure to connect to the MPLS or WAN, and to the critical design and build applications, can stop the production line, disrupt the manufacturing cycle, and impact bottom-line revenue. IT was under tremendous pressure to manage the implementation of a Cisco ACI-based software-defined data center, as well as put in place a single solution to monitor their plant and office automation tools. A further challenge was the need to monitor manufacturing plants without installing agents on the production network.

The high-tech company was experiencing issues with their unified communications deployment that were difficult to pinpoint and were impacting their user community. Several legacy packet brokers were outdated and upgrading that product’s features and capabilities would require complete replacement. They work with several market-leading public cloud partners to provide solutions to customers, and in trying to deliver the highest-quality customer experience found themselves lacking visibility into the virtualized servers and the east-west traffic in these environments. Any one of these projects would require a commitment in time for vendor and solution analysis, as well as for budget justification and authorization. Any way they could possibly combine these projects would accelerate the return on investment in time and cost.

The global agricultural, construction and forestry equipment manufacturer was facing the challenge of ensuring flawless access to its network and applications, as well as communication systems. The company’s existing monitoring solution was only capable of reactively troubleshooting TCP traffic and offered limited DNS support and insufficient packet capture capacity. The IT team needed to replace their reactive troubleshooting platform with a proactive solution that could provide both detection and troubleshooting, so the team could fix problems before they impacted end-users. A solution was required that would offer robust application visibility with large packet storage and retrieval ability for data analysis of vital ecosystems. In particular, IT needed application analysis on UDP traffic, as well as Layer-2 analysis. A new solution would have to include an end-user view and performance metrics for on premise and hybrid cloud applications, such as the company’s new Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) deployment – a combination of Cisco voice and Microsoft Skype for Business technology. In addition, IT needed a highly scalable solution to meet the volume requirements of their expansive infrastructure, one that would provide simple workflows in a single product.

The multi-national manufacturing company relied heavily on their ERP system from SAP to operate their business but performance problems were impacting customer service, limiting revenue opportunity, and risking the company’s reputation. In many cases, it would take customer service representatives 8 – 9 minutes to enter a customer order into the system that should normally take about 1 minute. The delay was caused by slow performance with the ERP screens and the system temporarily freezing. It was not uncommon for the system to freeze multiple times during a single transaction and the customer service representatives found themselves making small talk each time. Not only did this risk damage to the company’s reputation, but it also impacted the total number of orders that could be taken on any given day which affected overall revenue. This was a critical problem that needed to be addressed. The IT team was running blind with no network, server, or application monitoring or management. They had been trying to solve the problem by manually parsing log files, which was not only time consuming but not working. They knew they needed better visibility and a tool that could point them to the root cause.

The Voice Operations team of a leading Central European provider faced several challenges. The relaxation of regulations had led to increased competition and aggressive subscription pricing from competitors. The company had entities across multiple countries and had recently combined country-specific business units to form functional teams operating across larger regions. This resulted in the creation of a single Voice Network Operations team serving customers in multiple countries. However, the use of disparate toolsets across these teams was a significant issue. Some teams utilized NETSCOUT’s service assurance tools, while others used a competing solution that lacked full visibility to network performance. The provider believed that troubleshooting would be more difficult and time-consuming when multiple points needed to be checked to find an underlying issue. The use of multiple platforms also resulted in different network efficiency metrics being reported, eliminating the possibility of consistent comparisons and providing an inconsistent and unreliable view of performance. The company was also under pressure to control costs and avoid network outages that could lead to revenue loss and customer churn.

The National Bank of Abu Dhabi was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They were in need of a solution that could optimize the performance of their IT services and reduce degradations and outages. Before selecting the NETSCOUT solution, they considered other vendors such as Opnet.

The large enterprise energy & utilities company was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They found that using a single service-oriented performance management platform was the most effective solution. The company considered various vendors including Riverbed and Network Instruments before selecting the NETSCOUT solution to solve their critical IT challenges like reducing degradations and outages.

The state and local government was facing challenges in triaging service performance issues. They were spending a significant amount of time in the war room resolving a core service incident. They were considering various vendors including CA, Riverbed, NetQoS, and HP to solve critical IT challenges like reducing degradations and outages.

The healthcare organization was experiencing radiology application slowdown issues that were impacting patients. Doctors and nurses were suffering significant wait times of up to 20 minutes delay in pulling up cardiology images. These cardiology images were critical to have available during patients’ exams for evaluation and diagnosis. Given the nature of the cardiology practice, minutes can mean the difference between life and death. The radiology information system (RIS), that leverages the DICOM protocol (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) to communicate, was responsible for the file transfers, how the documents are stored, and how the doctors are able to access the right radiology image for the patient in question. In trying to triage the problem over a few weeks, several war room calls were conducted that included a number of the healthcare organization’s IT staff as well as third-party vendors, including the application provider. At times, there were upward of 20 people on the daily call trying to pinpoint the source of the problem. A great deal of time was lost as each vendor tried to prove it wasn’t their part of the environment which was creating the slowdown.

The company’s distributed, worldwide factories are critical to achieving overall production quotas, and they must perform as well as the main manufacturing facilities. Not surprisingly, the distributed plants rely heavily on IT technology, such as automated assembly lines that communicate instructions and status between equipment on the lines. In addition, not all the company’s remote facilities use centralized IT services; rather, they use locally hosted applications. These remote facilities are run on a “network in a box,” where VMware ESX servers are used to host manufacturing / production applications that are responsible for bar code scanning, printing, and communications as well as underlying network protocols like DNS, file services, and LDAP. These applications are critical to operating the production line and business processes at the plants. When communication between machines slows or stops, the symptoms may not be quickly apparent locally and can persist for a few hours, leading to delays on the lines, halting the lines completely, or creating issues requiring rework.

The network operations (NetOps) group at this manufacturer had historically relied on a NetFlow-based network performance management tool to monitor their corporate data center. However, this had become ineffective at providing the level of detail necessary to truly find the source of issues as the company adopted digital transformations and modernizations. Slowdowns or degradations in performance in their production, inventory, or customer resource management applications can have drastic impact on targeted business goals. The NetOps group had several strategic requirements for their new service assurance solution: the ability to analyze activity across multi-tier services – including Web, application and database servers; Internet traffic; and evaluating the performance of 50 top applications for manufacturing, billing, and customer-facing websites and portals. With the added complexity of having voice, video, and business data services that required performance assurance across a high-speed, global network, the NetOps team had scalability and consolidated analysis and views at the top of their list of requirements as well.

The division of a multi-billion-dollar manufacturing company was facing multiple concerns that needed to be addressed for achieving data center transformation. The immediate concern was ongoing issues with a mission-critical manufacturing application used for planning and scheduling materials, resources, and manufacture of their final products. Any delay or downtime with the application could result in delays or missed deliveries impacting revenue and reputation. However, they lacked the visibility necessary to proactively identify degradations in performance and quickly pinpoint the source of the issue. The company was also experiencing continual degraded performance of communications applications hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud impacting customers and employees based in 200 regional offices. The data center transformation this manufacturer had undergone over the recent years created a void in their visibility into performance across their hybrid cloud network.