Case Study

Agency Saves Time and Money with Holistic nGeniusONE Solution

Agency Saves Time and Money with Holistic nGeniusONE Solution

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Agency had multiple service assurance tools in their data centers and regional branch locations
  • Unable to gain holistic visibility or end-to-end analysis and troubleshooting for databases and email
  • Costly to maintain multiple, disjointed vendors & tools
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® service assurance platform and nGeniusONE Standby Server
  • InfiniStreamNG™ appliances
The Results
  • Lowered costs and complexity with a single vendor for service assurance management
  • Lowered MTTR by pinpointing source of issues across communications path from regional offices to data center
  • Extended the value of the investment in nGeniusONE solution with added visibility in regional offices

Customer Profile

This Federal government agency depends on tens of thousands of employees across more than twenty locations throughout the United States. The mission of this agency’s Information Technology group is to supply national infrastructure and business line technology services in core centralized data centers and at each of its remote offices. In delivering support for financial services, consumer protection, and community development, this organization is leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital transformation to provide efficient, secure services to their constituents.

The Challenge

This government agency was a long-standing NETSCOUT® customer using the nGeniusONE service assurance platform in their centralized data center locations. When they encountered problems troubleshooting issues that extended between their data centers and their regional offices, it was apparent they needed to extend the solution. Tools that had been deployed in the regional locations lacked 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. It was quickly apparent that his team lacked holistic visibility to perform end-to-end troubleshooting and service assurance. Further, from a cost and complexity perspective, 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.

Solution in Action

The agency had come to depend on the smart data and smart analytics from the nGeniusONE platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology for service assurance in their data centers. So much so, that they implemented the nGeniusONE standby server to ensure visibility even when back-up was required.

Discussions between the directors in IT and members of their network operations and application developers’ teams proved critical to demonstrating the value of the real-time, proactive performance management capabilities with the nGeniusONE solution for the entire organization. The Agency deployed InfiniStreamNG appliances in each of their regional offices, which enable network performance management (NPM) for traffic engineering, WAN management, and capacity planning throughout the United States.

Further, application performance management (APM) capabilities in the nGeniusONE platform have been instrumental in identifying and troubleshooting issues related to Oracle and Microsoft Exchange that were impacting users in remote offices connecting to the data center application servers. From a single common user interface, IT staff is able to seamlessly and contextually navigate from health status in dashboard views, to service dependency maps, to communities of impacted users, to session analysis and service monitors that pinpoint errors and true sources of disruptions.

The Results

Reducing the time to resolve issues experienced throughout the agency has been the biggest benefit to the IT staff. When it comes to financial services and consumer protection, time is an imperative, for both prompt customer service and employee productivity. Full visibility and analysis from data centers to regional offices have significantly improved their ability to pinpoint the source of problems quickly. By extension, this has also enhanced IT productivity and collaboration.

The Agency is extending the value of their investments in their nGeniusONE solution by deploying InfiniStreamNG appliances in their remote offices for full end-to-end visibility throughout locations nationwide. Using one management platform for all their service assurance needs, both NPM and APM, reduces costs associated with running additional un-integrated tools. Further, managing fewer vendors increases IT productivity and cuts costs by reducing time lost jumping between disparate tools and by having fewer vendors to maintain and support. Time and cost savings in product training, annual maintenance, and periodic product upgrades are all added benefits.

Ultimately, the agency is achieving another goal in reducing cost and complexity with a single, dedicated partner in NETSCOUT.