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The hospital network had gone through significant changes over the last decade, from both organic patient growth and strategic mergers and acquisitions. There are thousands of physicians, nurses, and staff administering care to hundreds of thousands of inpatient, outpatient, and emergency room patients every year. With more than a dozen hospitals and a hundred medical facilities, this hospital network is one of the largest in its region and essential to the healthcare of its community. The dependency on their networked applications, including electronic medical records (EMR) and imaging services, can’t be overstated. Their IT team is dedicated to delivering network, application, security, and performance tools that support these healthcare professionals. With one goal in mind – speedy, safe, secure, and efficient delivery of patient care services, the Information Technology (IT) team at this healthcare plays a pivotal role in delivering digital transformations to meet the evolving needs of the hospital organization. Their planned data center transformation was their latest effort to take their technology and applications to a new level in support of patient care services.

The bank was undergoing multiple digital transformations, which prompted the need for service edge visibility and proactive monitoring enhancements. The bank's transition of some on-premises data center operations to a third-party private cloud environment raised concerns about vendor compliance with their Service Level Agreement (SLA). The bank's Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) environment had already been migrated to the private cloud, and IT specialists in voice and video performance were similarly hindered by the blind spots in the new private cloud environment. The bank's increased use of Web-based platforms prompted a corresponding need to visualize and monitor those Webservices consistently, in real-time, rather than relying solely on troubleshooting as incidents occurred.

The hotel and gaming company was facing issues with their video slot machine performance. The IT Operations team was unable to resolve these issues with the installed vendor tool. The lack of cloud, virtual, and data center service edge visibility hindered real-time monitoring and troubleshooting efficiencies. The company's network performance monitoring tool failed to identify the issue, only suggesting a possible problem in their Cisco switch environment. This led to unproductive communications with Cisco, as their network switches were not at issue. The company needed quicker visualization and analysis to return gaming operations to customer-expected levels.

The main challenge facing this bank was recurring complaints from customers of slow or failed transactions. The online banking application forms would frequently time out or load slowly, interfering with new customers attempting to sign up for the service. Payment processing was also delayed and intermittently failing, which directly impacted revenue. If transactions didn’t go through, payments could be declined, purchases could fail, all leading to very unhappy customers, potential damage to the bank’s reputation, and lost revenue for the bank. Therefore, it was incredibly urgent for the NetOps and AppOps teams to locate the root cause of any failures as quickly as possible any time an issue was reported. None of their existing tools helped to proactively identify when issues were occurring, so the only way they had of finding out when there was a problem was customer complaints, which was not ideal.

The airline's IT organization was facing a strategic challenge to upgrade their service assurance visibility. Their existing management platform was made 'end of life' by the vendor and no longer supported the modern technology and service needs of the airline organization. The IT executives wanted to reduce the complexity and costs associated with using multiple non-integrated tools from several disparate vendors. During the proposals and evaluations period, the airline suffered a costly network outage directly impacting the call centers and reservation / ticketing system, which further emphasized the need for a new network and application performance management solution.

The hospital uses remote workers, specifically radiologists, to deliver expert service to their patients. These remote radiologists consistently reported delays when logging in via VPN to access the application delivering the digital images. They also experienced very slow download times of the 100MB and larger digital files they needed to analyze. Any delay in accessing and analyzing the digital files could delay a timely diagnosis and treatment for the patient. IT faced considerable challenges in their efforts to improve the experience for the remote radiologists and help them provide quicker results. Since the radiologists were not in the organization’s offices or health centers, IT lacked essential visibility into their experience. With no data around the problem, IT was stymied in troubleshooting, not having a starting place to isolate the root cause.

The healthcare provider was facing challenges in ensuring high-quality subscriber exchanges with their Contact Center in support of insurance issues. They were experiencing ongoing IT challenges in differentiating application, network, UC, and service interdependency performance issues. The expansion of their remote facilities environment required visibility and monitoring. The healthcare provider’s business growth presented other challenges to the IT team. Their real estate footprint had grown to a total of 75 agent locations and 125 remote sites, which all now required visibility and performance monitoring. The IT team had found other tools and approaches woefully ineffective, and they had grown increasingly frustrated regarding this lack of visibility.

The healthcare IT company is known for leading solutions in the areas of clinical electronic health records (EHR), financial revenue cycle management (RCM) applications and general operational services for small, medium and/or large healthcare organizations. Their customers expect swift responses and continuous availability to their patient and billing information. Delays in accessing this information can negatively impact prompt, efficient patient care. With innovative customer service being a guiding principle for this company, their IT staff had long relied on NETSCOUT® service assurance solutions to stay ahead of, and rapidly troubleshoot customer impacting issues.

The healthcare organization was tasked with replacing its legacy applications and implementing a new cloud-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) service. This presented several challenges to the IT team. A new infrastructure was required to delineate performance responsibilities between the healthcare organization and the cloud vendor. Visibility was essential to determine who would be responsible for problems and how to pinpoint and resolve them quickly. The plan was to incorporate service assurance visibility as an integral part of the overall deployment of the infrastructure and cloud-based EMR service from the very start of the project. Pre-deployment application testing was a step in the project plan to ensure when the time came for go-live, the transition would be flawless.

The bank’s biggest challenge was a lack of visibility into critical business applications and services, at the network and application level. The NetOps team was responsible for monitoring hundreds of virtual links, but had no alarming set up to let them know if one of those links had an issue. They had hundreds of business applications they were responsible for, but no proactive application performance monitoring or alerting. Many of these business applications were critical for revenue generation or customer retention, some used to interconnect with third party payment processors or other execution of financial transactions. User experience suffered when these applications experienced degraded performance and IT was left unaware until end users complained. Security was also a concern to the bank, as they strived to find ways to identify unauthorized attempts to access the network.

The financial institution was undergoing a multi-year digital transformation project aimed at revolutionizing how services are delivered to their end users. This included moving some of their infrastructure services to Cologix and Equinix for hosting some of their data center and infrastructure needs. They also selected VMware as part of their virtualization strategy, making deployment of new, customer-benefiting applications and services faster and more agile. Software-as-a-Service solutions, such as Microsoft’s SKYPE for Business for voice communications have been part of this evolution as well. As part of this project, activities such as capacity planning and performance monitoring were being insourced from third party vendors and taken over by the NetOps team. The need for accurate, end-to-end visibility to support service assurance became a priority to meet these needs. This was deemed an essential part of a successful migration given the increased complexity of a multi-cloud environment.

The company was facing staffing shortfalls during high-traffic annual tax filing periods, which was a critical time in their financial calendar. The Network Operations (NetOps) team was short of in-demand subject matter experts due to staff promotions, transfers, departures, and vacation schedules. Despite engaging NETSCOUT for regularly scheduled nGeniusONE knowledge transfer sessions, the team was still short-handed. The company’s technology landscape was also getting more complex, involving third-party providers and cloud delivery platforms that occasionally experienced performance anomalies that NetOps needed to triage. The company needed to find an innovative way to maximize the use, and extend the value, of the nGeniusONE platform to monitor and analyze new applications that were regularly added by the company’s business units.

The financial services company, with a customer base spanning the United States and abroad, was under tremendous pressure to ensure service availability and uptime for customers and employees twenty-four hours a day. Any downtime or performance issues with the bank’s critical applications such as online banking applications, brokerage applications, or small business management services would adversely impact the business. Internally, tens of thousands of bank employees are home workers, and depend on the VPN service to access the corporate network. On several occasions, round trip delay and jitter would increase to more than 200 ms for soft phone services and other applications running over the VPN tunnel. Investigating this issue, and countless others, fully occupied IT staff, who spent significant time troubleshooting production impacting application and server issues that didn’t necessarily stem from network issues. Without visibility into the real-time or historical performance of applications and servers, unacceptable delays were introduced into the fault isolation process.

The bank’s stated mission is to fully satisfy the financial needs of its customers through a comprehensive range of products and outstanding service. This commitment to excellence meant that the bank’s vital network and applications must be reliable and free of degradations, in order for employees and customers to complete transactions in a timely manner at any of the bank’s thousands of remote branch locations. The IT team faced considerable challenges when end-users began experiencing exceedingly slow web browsing to external websites from branch offices, even as internal web-based applications worked fine. This degradation was causing significant delays, which directly impacted daily bank operations in all branches. Customer and employee satisfaction was greatly jeopardized. To address the problem, IT needed global visibility into services, offices, and users across the wide area network.

The bank was experiencing intermittent service degradations and outages, which were negatively impacting the customer experience and jeopardizing the bank’s service reputation. The IT team was under tremendous pressure to achieve service assurance, but their tools were ineffective at detecting and resolving issues before users were impacted. They found themselves in a reactive position, relying on outdated tools to try and uncover the source of issues. The Network, Applications, and Unified Communications (UC) teams recognized the need to be more proactive and collaborative as they all engaged in troubleshooting the root cause of problems but did not have the necessary data to easily collaborate.

The bank was engaged in a high-profile, multi-faceted, and costly unified communication (UC) upgrade project across their call centers and data centers, moving to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking from a traditional time-division multiplexing (TDM) model. This initiative was projected to save the company $1 million per month. However, this multi-vendor voice environment required 24-hour uptime, which was being compromised by quality of service (QoS) issues. Queues began filling up as calls flooded into the call centers, resulting in long delays, which in turn negatively impacted the customer service experience. IT was faced with the significant challenge of finding the source of the problem among different session border controller (SBC), media Intranet and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology vendors. Lacking vendor-independent visibility into this complex environment resulted in massive finger pointing and long delays in resolving issues.

The financial services organization faced a significant challenge when merchants began reporting intermittent issues with cards being declined at point-of-sale (POS) terminals. This was causing a poor end-user experience, lost revenue, and customer satisfaction issues. The IT staff had no visibility into the company’s network, making it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of the transaction failures. The declined transactions could have been an indication of an actual transaction failure or just an authorization failure. Without deeper insights, resolving the problem proved a significant challenge.

The bank had recently deployed Microsoft Skype for Business technology to supplement inplace Unified Communications (UC) technology in their Contact Center. However, the IT team began experiencing issues in troubleshooting the UC technology environment. Specifically, the IT team found Skype very hard to monitor, and their existing tools did not provide successful troubleshooting approaches. These issues soon began impacting customer service quality, and IT realized a need to introduce a solution that would help better monitor its Contact Center technology.

The university was experiencing slow responsiveness in its application services, affecting email and other collaborative tools used by students and faculty. These tools were essential for class registration, accessing schedules, turning in assignments, disseminating messages and emergency notifications, as well as making tuition payments and conducting recruitment. The complexity of the network, spanning multiple campuses, left IT uncertain about the source of the problem. Without much needed intelligence and traffic insights, the IT team was unable to determine if the issue was in the campus networks, the WAN MPLS links or the services hosted at the main data center.

The university was undergoing a data center transformation, including virtualization and high-speed connectivity. However, their legacy network performance monitoring (NPM) tool was not up to the task of supporting this strategic initiative. The NPM tool had limited visibility due to its use of a NetFlow-focused data source, making collaboration nearly impossible due to the lack of integration between data and voice monitoring tools. Additionally, the troubleshooting processes were reportedly cumbersome and slow, which delayed resolution to application and network performance issues. With the university’s data center transformation including plans for VMware ESX hypervisor infrastructure, Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN), and cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 services, there was a need for a new NPM tool that could support these IT transformation activities, while meeting firm budget guidelines.

The IT department at Instituto Politécnico Nacional, one of Mexico’s largest public universities, was facing frequent web services outages in the student and staff portals, which negatively impacted the end-user experience. Symptoms included network slowness, web pages not loading, and total site downtime. Disconnected point tools showed parts of the problem, but couldn’t provide end-to-end visibility in order to identify the root cause. The university’s IT team recognized the opportunity to become more proactive in finding and resolving problems in order to improve the student’s digital experience and better support the educational mission of the institution.

The Board of Education (BOE) for a Canadian city was facing challenges due to the addition of new schools, which increased network traffic and links to IT Data Centers, potentially resulting in oversubscribed links. The BOE's IT team identified a need for an updated network capacity management solution. Furthermore, managing student populations posed information security challenges, and the BOE’s IT Security team oversees cybersecurity of the school system’s network and resources. The Network Operations team approached NETSCOUT regarding the need to solve potential data center and network link oversubscription via coordinated capacity planning.

The U.S. grocery chain was under pressure to secure and protect the wireless infrastructure across thousands of stores and ensure compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. The existing in-house wireless tools lacked the capabilities that would enable IT to comply with these stringent rules. Failure to meet PCI DSS mandates carried the risk of millions of dollars in fines, not to mention the potential of damaging the grocer’s highly respected brand. The company also wanted to secure their wireless networks against rogue access points to protect customer cell phones from the risk of being hacked or having personal data stolen. Beyond exposure to hacking, the company required service assurance for its network in order to ensure that wireless intrusion protection and detection systems were constantly connected. Also, IT needed remote troubleshooting capabilities because flying personnel to distant locations wasn’t always feasible or cost-effective.

The national retail chain was facing network congestion that was causing service degradations, severely impacting employee productivity and customer services. The IT team was unable to quickly identify the root cause of the issues. Unauthorized use of applications on the company’s network also presented security risks for the business. The company was unaware that employees were using thin clients for personal use, streaming video during work hours, causing a spike in traffic and degradation across the system.

The national retailer faced several challenges. Firstly, the wire data collected from centralized bottlenecks obscured the origination point of the traffic in the distribution centers. This made it difficult to understand where problems were originating. Secondly, with new applications and services regularly being rolled out, the IT team had poor visibility into potential performance issues. Lastly, call quality issues were a concern as they risked harming the customer experience and thus the reputation of the business. The retailer needed a solution that could provide visibility into network traffic, monitor the impact of new applications on the network, and ensure high-quality voice services.

The manufacturer was facing frequent issues with their Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, which connects their data center to over 50 remote manufacturing and warehouse locations. Their existing tools did not provide the necessary visibility into the network to identify what was consuming the bandwidth and causing intermittent disruptions. This lack of visibility was causing increased reports of application access issues from their remote locations, and the IT team was losing valuable time trying to pinpoint the cause. The IT team needed a solution that would provide visibility into their MPLS network and help them quickly and effectively troubleshoot problems.

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 UK financial services leader was experiencing business growth which necessitated data center expansion. This expansion led to an increase in network traffic and cybersecurity risks. The bank's IT organization had to manage these challenges while also working collaboratively with the cybersecurity team to ensure visibility into wire traffic for all their monitoring needs. The bank also uses an external provider to assist with network operations management. The cybersecurity team had deployed various third-party solutions in the data center environment. To maximize the efficiency of these cybersecurity platforms, the bank required network packet broker technology capable of filtering and forwarding traffic to the appropriate cybersecurity and/or monitoring system for analysis.

The International stock exchange was experiencing slowdowns and disruptions in several of their business applications, like Web services, Citrix, and backend databases. Simultaneously, issues were impacting the application services used on their trading floor, such as FIX and ITCH. The importance of a properly operating trading floor can’t be understated, where the difference in response time of only milliseconds can mean millions in global currencies. The IT team had long been strong proponents of performance monitoring tools to help troubleshoot the source of such problems. Their existing tool offered limited application analysis, which while helpful when they first started using it years ago, now lacked depth of analysis, real-time monitoring, and key details to pinpoint the true root cause of these disruptions.

The company’s portfolio includes mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and brokerage services. As a result, customers and employees rely on critical financial and web-based applications and business services for important functions, such as making investment decisions and monitoring performance of stock trading and market data feeds to help them manage trillions of dollars in investments. The company began experiencing limitations with the performance they were receiving from the legacy information technology (IT) operating in their data center. A particularly troublesome issue was application owners were struggling to maintain visibility into the performance of financial business services. The IT application owners knew the importance of finding and resolving any latencies as quickly as possible. Slow market data feeds have a potentially massive fiscal impact in the financial services marketplace.