Assuring World-Class Pharma Business Operations With NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring

Customer Profile

This leading biopharmaceutical company develops diversified, essential products that improve quality of lives for millions of patients around the globe.

The company’s commitment to sustaining world-class Research & Development (R&D) and business operations during the initial stages of the global pandemic helped them achieve double-digit revenue increases for their most recent fiscal year

The Challenge

Business growth caused associated expansion across network, cloud service, data center, and, thanks to hybrid workforce transitions, client service edges. With IT Operations required to successfully visualize these environments to assure pharma services delivery, there was a brighter spotlight on the vendor tool used to monitor the company’s network and service infrastructure. Historically, the tool’s visibility limitations forced IT teams to work reactively when it came to troubleshooting and remediating service delivery issues. With that tool’s lack of situational awareness, when an incident did occur, IT leadership was required to notify research teams, data scientists, and external users about associated impacts, which only served to further expose the criticality of these concerns to company executives.

Another concern for an IT Operations team charged with managing company data in all forms would be seen in one particular network microburst occurrence. Since the vendor tool was unable to provide meaningful visibility into root cause necessary for remediation, that microburst translated into unexplained data loss related to dropped network packets.

The scheduling of a near-term business-critical application migration further raised the criticality of these visibility and monitoring shortcomings to the Network and Infrastructure teams charged with that project’s oversight. Based on their experience, there was a collective understanding that application migrations can become problematic without before, during, and after visualization assurances that service delivery and end-user experience had not been adversely impacted by such application changes.

IT leadership believed the combination of these concerns warranted a need to revisit their application and performance management strategy to identify a service assurance vendor technology offering enhanced visibility that promoted proactive performance diagnoses, reduced mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) cycles and business stakeholder involvement, and improved root cause analysis.

Solution in Action

As a result of evaluating industry-recognized solution providers seen as equipped to handle their challenges, IT leadership selected the NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring solution to improve their service edge visibility and better assure end-to-end performance of their network, application, and business service environment.

NETSCOUT’s “smart visibility, smarter analytics” approach provided some quickly realized incident response, root cause analysis, and MTTR improvements that validated IT leadership’s decision, including the following examples:

• Resolved microburst event: By factoring changing service delivery architecture and visualizing all service edges, the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform leveraged NETSCOUT smart data generated from the pharma’s network traffic packets to isolate the microburst instance, including where and why it was happening, in a manner that eluded their former vendor tool. Resolving that issue helped foster NETSCOUT solution operationalization across other IT teams.
• Restored reliable Microsoft Teams performance: IT Operations resolved end-user experience issues in the company’s collaboration environment by using the NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring solution to provide visibility at client edges supporting remote pharma employees, as well as cloud service edges used by the Microsoft Teams software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. With NETSCOUT’s smart data again fueling nGeniusONE analytics, IT visualized that Microsoft Teams traffic was not being categorized by the pharma’s Cisco Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR) solution, which resulted in the impaired quality of service (QoS). IT Operations then identified which streams and services were not being allowed to be promulgated across their network at the appropriate QoS and made necessary configuration changes to improve service delivery.
• Improved Video Broadcast Quality for Company Executives: After a Senior Executive’s broadcast to the rest of the company experienced lost connectivity and video break-up issues, IT Operations took advantage of the NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring solution’s service edge visibility and synthetic testing into user experience to determine that the executive team had a poorly established policy, which was quickly resolved later that day.

The Results

The Network and Infrastructure teams moved ahead confidently with the company’s critical application migration project, knowing the NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring solution provided visibility across their expanding service edge environment. With this solution, nGeniusONE provided single pane-of-glass views into business service performance and end-user experience, regardless of app type or delivery platform (e.g., on-premises, cloud, or SaaS).

For a pharma organization concerned with data integrity and security like this one, NETSCOUT’s ability to generate smart data in real-time from the company’s network traffic packets to fuel nGeniusONE performance analytics into business service operations has promoted increased operationalization across the Voice, Operations, Applications, Data Science and Security IT teams.

Of equal relevance, IT Operations transitioned to a proactive application, network, and business service monitoring approach that improved access and delivery to the R&D, Scientific, Sales, Marketing, Distribution, and Executive teams in a manner that sustains the company’s plans for extended growth.