Driving Visibility for a Vehicle Manufacturer’s Multi-tiered Applications

Customer Profile

This large, 75-year-old, global vehicle manufacturer designs, produces, and distributes passenger and commercial vehicles, motorcycles, engines, and turbomachinery in more than 100 countries around the world. They manufacture using several brands, in tens of dozens of plants, in more than 20 countries worldwide. Based in Europe, this vehicle manufacturer’s hundreds of thousands of employees also deliver related business services, including financing, leasing, and fleet management. With a commitment to sustainable mobility as a way to transform its core business, the company is at the forefront of technology innovation – and this extends to their Information Technology (IT). Efficiency and quality performance are essential to meet production, financing, fleet and customer-related objectives.

The Challenge

The network operations (NetOps) group at this manufacturer had historically relied on a NetFlow-based network performance management tool to monitor their corporate data center. However, this had become ineffective at providing the level of detail necessary to truly find the source of issues as the company adopted digital transformations and modernizations. Understandably, slowdowns or degradations in performance in their production, inventory, or customer resource management applications can have drastic impact on targeted business goals.

The NetOps group had several strategic requirements for their new service assurance solution: the ability to analyze activity across multi-tier services – including Web, application and database servers; Internet traffic; and evaluating the performance of 50 top applications for manufacturing, billing, and customer-facing websites and portals. With the added complexity of having voice, video, and business data services that required performance assurance across a high-speed, global network, the NetOps team had scalability and consolidated analysis and views at the top of their list of requirements as well.

Solution in Action

The NetOps team performed a thoughtful and thorough evaluation of several possible alternatives for satisfying their requirements and selected the nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform with InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances from NETSCOUT®.

NETSCOUT offered the only solution to deliver broad visibility across their global data centers for performance of their voice, video, and business data services. Deployed in the 40GB and 10GB data center environments, ISNG appliances with NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology are transforming the manufacturer’s wire-traffic into smart data for smarter analytics in nGeniusONE for real-time, end-to-end visibility throughout the manufacturer’s global environment.

Key to the selection of nGeniusONE was a single pane-of-glass view of essential metrics and analysis from dashboard to packet. In particular, nGeniusONE offered real-time views and historical reports related to the performance of the manufacturer’s 50 most-important applications; that is, their multi-tiered applications and customer-facing, Web-based services. A major differentiation from alternative tool choices was that nGeniusONE incorporates analysis of the underlying dependencies for these services, including front end servers, DNS, and Active Directory services that could impact the performance of a multi-tiered or Web-based application. This gave the NetOps team real answers versus simply ruling out areas as a source of a slowdown or outage.

The NetOps team has already used the logical, intuitive workflows in nGeniusONE to quickly drill down from the dashboard views with identified errors to service dependency maps, session analysis, specialized service monitors, and finally to the packet, to quickly resolve a disruption in one of their application services. In one such case, they discovered a problem impacting one of their applications was actually the result of a bottleneck with their IBM WebSphere servers. This would have taken much longer to resolve had they not already deployed nGeniusONE.

The Results

This vehicle manufacturer is engineering next-generation vehicles, and they are highly dependent on their applications running flawlessly to meet their manufacturing, financing, revenue, and customer service business objectives. Disruptions simply must be minimized and avoided. The NetOps team is proactively getting ahead of bottlenecks and reducing the mean time to pinpoint and resolve (MTTR) issues in their earliest stages to minimize impact to the business and their customers.

Given the expansiveness of their global environment, including their main data centers and regional plants, along with dozens of critical voice, video and data services, the nGeniusONE single pane-of-glass visibility and analysis is helping to find issues missed by alternative tools. Finally, they are also benefiting from lower capex with fewer devices necessary for visibility, and lower opex with a single vendor to manage, now that their network and application performance visibility is provided by NETSCOUT.