Case Study

DoD Agency Enhances Visibility Into Operations and User Experience With NETSCOUT

DoD agency

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Evolving agency visibility requirements unmet by already‑deployed IT tools
  • Vendor-neutral monitoring approach required to enhance ROI from IT toolsets
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform, with smart analytics
  • InfiniStreamNG® appliances, with ASI‑generated smart data
  • nGenius® 5000 series packet flow switches supporting 100GB network speeds
The Results
  • Improved user experience across agency operations
  • Enhanced agency visibility and monitoring into mission-critical technologies

Customer Profile

This government agency provides highly specialized intelligence services that support the country’s Department of Defense (DoD) efforts to safeguard the nation’s citizens and resources.

A field-proven information technology (IT) environment supports this agency’s leadership and deployed personnel who serve in a variety of mission environments.

The Challenge

With emerging remote service delivery challenges resonating at even the highest level of DoD operations, this agency’s IT visibility requirements had evolved as a result. That’s where IT leadership had identified shortcomings in their currently installed solution – simply stated, that technology was not delivering network visibility as promised, nor visualizing user experience across agency operations.

As a result, the agency turned to a government-standard solicitation process to formalize their next-generation network and application performance visibility and monitoring requirements, with those high-level technical specifications defining a need for an enterprise-ready solution equipped to provide:

  • Continuous monitoring of end-user experience from multiple perspectives
  • Real-time awareness of impairments detrimental to strategic, urgent, worldwide communications
  • Intuitive and compressed IT workflows that enabled rapid triage
  • Support for historical analysis and investigations based on full-packet captures

In this environment, the agency had a strong organizational preference on identifying packet-based, vendor-agnostic solutions that could be integrated with other installed technologies, while also improving the use and value offered by those tools.

Solution in Action

The agency conducted a thorough evaluation of approaches before selecting the NETSCOUT® solution to improve service delivery to meet DoD-level requirements. As a result, the agency deployed a NETSCOUT solution that included the following:

  • nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, which provides the single-paneof-glass view into government network and application performance in a manner that also factored end-user experience.
  • InfiniStreamNG appliances, which generate the NETSCOUT “Smart Data” required for continuous and uniform visibility across this agency’s large-scale and diverse network environments. This Service Assurance platform’s smart analytics consume this smart data to supply views, alerts, and reports on key performance indicators, network and application error details, specialized service monitors, session records, and packet decodes that enable their IT teams to capitalize on the technology required to deliver superior user experience, while also ensuring successful digital transformation business objectives (e.g., Data Center and Cloud migrations, Unified Communications rollouts, and Security Analytics initiatives, amongst others).
  • nGenius 5000 Series Packet Flow Switch (PFS) technology, which supported 100GB network speeds, while delivering advanced link aggregation, packet filtering, and packet delivery functionality to the IT team.

Throughout their evaluation, IT leadership identified the NETSCOUT solution differentiators that would assure reliable service delivery across their environment, including providing the abilities to:

  • Produce deep and actionable insights into the end-users’ experience by analyzing live traffic.
  • Provide application-layer insights into the health and performance of off-the-shelf and custom-designed applications.
  • Support historical analysis and investigations with packet-based monitoring and analysis.
  • Seamlessly monitor within diverse network and application environments.
  • Display enterprise-wide health and performance details on nGeniusONE dashboard views that enabled proactive monitoring, intervention & planning, rapid triage, and visibility into server dependencies.
  • Discern between delays caused by the application, server, network, or client in complex environments.

The Results

NETSCOUT smart data, generated by ISNG appliances in real time from the agency’s network packet traffic, has improved IT visibility in this multi-vendor environment in the manner envisioned by the government solicitation. With nGeniusONE performance analytics consuming this smart data to present real-time performance snapshots across service dashboard and monitor views, the IT team accessed contextual workflows and drill-downs into performance and root cause analysis that helped reduce time to resolve issues and increase the reliability of service delivery to agency users.

In addition to the benefits identified during their solicitation review, the agency enhanced returns on investment delivered by other vendor tools by taking advantage of NETSCOUT PFS technology to accurately forward network packet data to downstream security monitoring tools.