Financial Leader Seamlessly Migrates to Azure With NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This financial services provider is a global leader, enjoying a significant market presence in the Americas, Europe, and APAC business regions.

The company successfully navigated pandemic-related financial service delivery challenges, reporting double-digit profits across the most recent fiscal year.

For years, the company’s information technology (IT) team has turned to NETSCOUT solutions to bring visibility into, and assure performance of, their next-generation data center infrastructure and network environment.

The Challenge

As part of this next-generation technology commitment, the company identified Microsoft Azure as their organizational cloud services platform. The project represented a critical undertaking for IT, involving business service & application migrations from numerous data centers to Azure Cloud services across their three geographic regions. Given this complexity, the IT leadership team wanted to enhance the security of this solution, which led them to utilize Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, which extended the company’s on-premises network segments into Azure Cloud services using a private connection.

As the IT teams worked to establish high-bandwidth routers required to support the secure network connection associated with migrating large-scale, business-essential workloads to Azure ExpressRoute, they began seeing performance issues at one of the company’s data centers. Not having yet deployed NETSCOUT smart visibility to support this Azure ExpressRoute network connection, the collective IT teams worked reactively to troubleshoot whether this issue related to:

• Network traffic imbalances (i.e., a NetOps domain)
• Azure ExpressRoute irregularity (i.e., a CloudOps domain)
• Internet service provider (ISP) or other service layer anomaly (i.e., potentially a multi-team IT domain)

With ExpressRoute, the “cloud edge” is categorized as a Microsoft Enterprise Edge (MSEE), which would represent the first point of contact into Azure Cloud for this IT organization. Regardless of IT ownership determination, the issue required resolution before the cutover to Azure ExpressRoute, which itself was a prerequisite for the company’s eventual migration to Azure Cloud.

Solution in Action

The company’s IT organization gained the visibility they needed to assure the network connection to Azure ExpressRoute by deploying InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) technology to passively monitor this new environment, instrumenting these NETSCOUT smart data sources at on-premises router demarcation points, as well as the data center edge to view “north-south” traffic traversing in/out of the data center.

With their contracted NETSCOUT Premium Support Services Engineer assisting the IT team’s efforts, real-time nGeniusONE Service Dashboard views were customized to provide single-pane-of-glass snapshots into the company’s data center and Azure ExpressRoute network connection environment that quickly showed high rates of failures, retransmissions, and timeouts associated with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in the company’s TCP/ IP network. By decisively excluding Azure ExpressRoute, ISP, or other service layers using the nGeniusONE troubleshooting workflow, the NetOps team soon established Service Dashboard views used for:

• Real-time monitoring of TCP healthrelated metrics
• Building a metrics baseline to track any variations in traffic behavior
• Automatically notifying NetOps of any nGeniusONE-detected violations

Previous experience with nGeniusONE enabled the NetOps team to easily integrate these dashboards and notifications into their standard business practices and provide immediate value from the additional visibility they afforded.

The Results

Securing and monitoring the Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute connection to Azure Cloud represented an important tactical win for the collective IT teams, also serving notice to company leadership that their investment in NETSCOUT would help provide visibility into new service edge environments. While the IT collaboration seen here occurred in just one regional environment, it set a template for monitoring Azure Express Routes across all geographies where the company was preparing for their Azure Cloud migration.

The company’s move to Azure was seen as a high-profile project, and it was critically important that IT leadership identify any barrier to success that would adversely impact their ability to offer customer benefits and business service delivery efficiencies that had already been identified in associated media coverage. Otherwise, customer satisfaction, business, and brand value could be impacted.

As the company moves to Azure Cloud, NETSCOUT continues to serve in a critically important role by bringing smart visibility across any service edge that IT may encounter.