Federal Agency Enhances Data Center and Network Monitoring Operations With NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This agency provides statistical reporting and financial recommendations to help guide the federal government’s efforts to sustain this country’s economic health.

The agency’s Network Operations (NetOps) team has for years relied on NETSCOUT solutions to assure high-quality data center operations, as well as monitor the network that supports business applications used by researchers and analysts.

The Challenge

As part of continued service delivery improvements across the agency environment, information technology (IT) leadership had secured federal budget commitments to upgrade their network to accommodate increased 40GB speeds, as well as establish a secondary data center to complement their primary data center operations.

While the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and deployed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources provided visibility into, and real-time monitoring of the data center core and across their external network, the IT leadership team was well aware establishing a second data center and adopting faster network speeds would require additional instrumentation beyond that in the production footprint.

Given the complexity of their multi-vendor technology environment, IT leadership wanted to approach this project with an agility that would support successful deployment of these new solutions without adversely impacting the day-to-day work of subject matter experts completing critical financial analysis on the nation’s behalf.

Solution in Action

The agency introduced needed visibility into their enhanced data center and network operations environment by deploying software-based ISNG appliance technology in their secondary data center.

In addition to supporting this upgraded data center and network environment, the ISNG software technology was easily assimilated into the agency’s long-deployed ISNG hardware appliance environment to extend end-to-end visibility that the IT team relied upon to address current-day monitoring requirements. Using smart data generated by these ISNG appliances in real time from the agency’s network traffic to source nGeniusONE’s performance analytics, the IT team was better able to address latter-day issues across the agency environment, including:

• Monitoring the user experience of analysts accessing business services over the virtual private network.
• Visualizing business service performance of the Microsoft Office 365 service.
• Assuring unified communications performance for employees relying on Microsoft Teams for voice communications and video collaboration.
• Accessing views that revealed spikes in remote network traffic generated from at-home users.

The Results

For government organizations with longtime IT operations such as this agency’s environment, the software-based ISNG appliance solution enables agile deployment of smart visibility required for real-time monitoring of their evolving data center operations and network designs.

With this approach, the IT leadership team met the agency’s cost-containment guidelines for these technology upgrades, while extending returns on investment from their deployed NETSCOUT real-time monitoring and smart visibility solution.

Another measure of project success for IT leadership was evidenced by their ability to deploy next-generation NETSCOUT smart visibility without compromising the agency’s everyday business service delivery or impacting day-to-day activities of analysts focused on improving the country’s economic environment.