European Insurance Leader Improves Global Business Performance with Real-time Monitoring from NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This European company is at the forefront of the global insurance and asset management marketplace, realizing financial success by maintaining semi-autonomous business operations in more than 50 countries. In recent years, the company’s global revenues have increased through the expansion of diversified insurance and financial vehicles, new technology partnerships, and several regional acquisitions. As a result, company revenues for the most recently completed fiscal year exceeded 100B Euros.

Amid this corporate growth and the company’s embracing of Insurance Technology and Internet of Things (IoT) innovations, there is a significant IT operation keeping this global business up and running. Over the years, many of the company’s European and US IT centers have sequentially adopted NETSCOUT solutions as the gold standard for Service Assurance.

The Challenge

One of the company’s regional European data centers had been experiencing errors with load balancer performance, including mismatched traffic. While the local IT team had network packet analysis tools they routinely used for troubleshooting, this regional data center had not yet deployed NETSCOUT service assurance solutions to monitor their network and applications environments. As a result, their assigned Network Operations (NetOps) specialists were unable to capture the network traffic necessary for conducting post-incident forensic activities typically used to prove load balancers were functioning properly. In addition, NetOps could not determine whether the performance issue related to a load balancer misconfiguration, network congestion, or another technology platform running in their multi-tier environment.

The NetOps team’s frustrations with this scenario aside, these types of load balancer performance challenges (if left unchecked) can potentially cause:

• Application performance issues (e.g., slow response times, outages)
• Business service disruptions, leading to lost sales, policy claim delays, and customer frustration
• Reduced employee productivity
• Adverse impact to the company brand’s reputation

This NetOps team also wanted to enhance real-time monitoring and visibility into the performance of the company’s Web platforms, as everyday insurance and financial business was reliant on high-performing Web services.

Wanting to ensure continued regional business for the company, the local IT team consulted with their corporate peers to investigate new solutions to these issues.

Solution in Action

The company looked within for a proven technology already providing similar Service Assurance solutions across the business, and local leadership arrived at standardizing their IT operations on the nGeniusONE platform.

The NetOps team quickly gained much-needed network visibility by deploying InfiniStreamNG appliances at the regional data center, using NETSCOUT’s data sources to provide the continuous 24x7 monitoring they had lacked, as well as the on-demand packet captures needed for their traditional post-incident forensic analysis.

In supporting their regional 10 Gig network demands, the local IT team deployed NETSCOUT’s nGenius packet flow switch (PFS) technology at key measurement points, then used the PFS to aggregate and send traffic to ISNG appliances. The nGeniusONE solution leverages NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, which converts network traffic gathered at these collection points into highly structured smart data used to fuel nGeniusONE’s performance analytics.

The NetOps team used nGeniusONE to quickly visualize, troubleshoot, and solve the load balancer issues. They also established Service Dashboard views for real-time analysis into their Web applications environment, as well as HTTP and HTTPS traffic flows.

The NetOps team is now able to quickly troubleshoot and isolate the sources contributing to performance degradation within the regional data center’s multi-tier environments, including load balancers and firewalls, as well Webservers, application servers, backend databases, and load balancers.

The Results

With nGeniusONE already providing converged Network, Application, and Unified Communications monitoring solutions to IT teams operating across several continents, company leadership recently made the decision to adopt NETSCOUT technology as their global standard for Service Assurance.

In addition, across-the-business successes with NETSCOUT’s Arbor Cloud™ and Arbor Edge Defense solutions similarly prompted the company to select NETSCOUT as their global standard for DDoS prevention solutions.

The company realizes CapEx and OpEx benefits from this business relationship by using a single vendor for service assurance and DDoS protection. The company is reducing complexity and costs associated with multiple maintenance contracts and training, as well as interoperability challenges with conflicting data and associated vendor finger-pointing.