Case Study

Chinese Consumer Finance Company Protects End User Experience with nGeniusONE

Chinese Consumer Finance Company Protects End User Experience with nGeniusONE

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Customer-facing business services experiencing unacceptable delays
  • Lack of tools for rapid root cause analysis
  • Lack of visibility into historical network utilization trends
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
  • COTS-based InfiniStreamNG™ software on NETSCOUT® certified appliances
  • vSCOUT™ virtual appliance
  • nGenius® 5010 Packet Flow Switch
The Results
  • Improved customer retention
  • Faster time to knowledge
  • Significant cost savings

Customer Profile

This financial services group is a pioneer of the online-to-offline (O2O) finance model in China whose main service offering is consumer loan products. This lean but agile business operates out of less than a dozen offices, but still supports millions of customers, driving an annual revenue of more than 5 billion RMB. As a business that depends on the rapid success of loan applications and approvals, service assurance is of great importance to this organization.

The Challenge

This company was facing challenges in delivering rapid, always-on services to current and prospective customers. Problems were going undiscovered until after they became customer affecting, and NetOps / AppOps struggled to quickly identify the root cause of service slowness. Users were frequently unable to submit online applications or loan payments because the service was so slow it would time out before completion.

When customers reported problems, the AppOps team was able to observe that transaction rates were lower than expected but lacked the tools or visibility to quickly understand why.

Solution in Action

NETSCOUT solutions have truly revolutionized this company’s monitoring strategy. The NetOps team deployed COTS-based InfiniStreamNG software on NETSCOUT certified appliances and vSCOUT virtual appliances strategically throughout the datacenter and virtualized servers to provide end-to-end monitoring of the complete application path so that the AppOps and NetOps teams can quickly locate network or application failures. NETSCOUT’s packet flow switch provides a passive monitoring fabric to collect and aggregate the wire data from vSCOUT and forwards it to an InfiniStreamNG interface, providing full Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) smart data in the virtualized environment.

The smart data generated by these data sources is converted into smarter analytics by the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform. Extracted from rich wire data, these analytics are displayed in dozens of custom dashboards, showing at a glance views into more than 100 essential business applications. Alerts are configured to proactively notify the AppOps and NetOps teams when a service is starting to degrade. This allows them to jump into action and proactively resolve the issue before it becomes customer affecting. When they want to investigate a specific application or interface, the Search & Discover tool is very popular to get them to precisely the Service Monitor or Service Dependency view they want to look at.

In one instance, a loan service application was upgraded at the same time a promotional campaign was launched. The response to the promotion was great, but users experienced very poor service when they tried to sign up. NetOps observed that due to the success of the promotional campaign their average network throughput had tripled. In the past, they would have just upgraded the link, a costly endeavor. With the help of nGeniusONE, AppOps and NetOps collaboratively discovered that some pictures in the application were not compressed properly, causing the network congestion.

The Results

By fixing the compression issue, IT was able to alleviate the congestion and save the company money. While they did still end up ordering a bandwidth upgrade, it was much smaller than they would have ordered without NETSCOUT visibility, a significant cost savings of over 150,000 RMB annually.

With the nGenius solution in place, service uptime has dramatically improved. Issues are identified and resolved faster, and NetOps is better able to plan and budget changes in bandwidth to ensure capacity is available when the business is running campaigns and promotions that require it.

The new dashboards and reporting allow NetOps and AppOps to collaborate more effectively, saving both time and money with the new expanded visibility. Best of all, the overall service and reliability is improved, increasing customer satisfaction and retention. When the internet is the business, there can be no off.