Global Hospitality Assures Quality Application Services in the Cloud

Customer Profile

This U.S.-based hospitality corporation generates billions in revenue every year managing dozens of resorts, with more under construction. At nearly a half-century in a business that operates under several brands, the resort company relies on thousands of dedicated employees around the world to deliver memorable getaways to their customers. Part of this commitment to customer satisfaction has driven the company to transform their digital experience. Internet of Things (IoT) – supported enhancements like on-line reservations, electronic check-in, and paperless payment systems make the process easier for traveling customers.

Business Challenge

Customer experience is a top priority for this hospitality company. And this is apparent in the efforts of the IT team, as well. The network engineering group has gone to great lengths to provide service assurance in their global data centers, as well as at each individual resort location. In so doing, they have ways to proactively monitor and address application delays and outages that could impact the business and/or their customers.

Recently, the company had introduced a new application to manage customer activity at their resorts – everything from reservations and check in, to purchases during their stay, to payment and guest checkout were conducted through this application. The guest services application was hosted on servers in a third-party cloud provider environment. The application team counseled the network team that when an application performs poorly and impacts customer experience, they needed troubleshooting visibility, regardless of whether the application server was in the private or public cloud. The network team turned to their trusted partner NETSCOUT to bridge this gap in application service assurance visibility for the servers in the cloud.

NETSCOUT Solution

The hospitality corporation was already utilizing the NETSCOUT solution across its private network and global locations. For each of their resort locations, they have standardized on a “kit” that includes a local nGeniusONE platform, InfiniStreamNG™ appliances, nGenius® Packet Flow Switches, and OptiViewXG® Network Analysis tablet technology. These remote installations operate with the NETSCOUT deployment in the private cloud that includes a global nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform, InfiniStream appliances, and nGenius Packet Flow Switches. When it came time to close the visibility gap and extend service assurance for their application servers in the public cloud, they added the vSTREAM software appliance that sends Adaptive Session Intelligence™ (ASI) smart data to the corporate nGeniusONE platform. Strategically, this provided the IT team comprehensive, vendor-independent, end-to-end visibility and service assurance for its customer-impacting services.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

In collaboration with the third-party cloud provider, the hospitality company deployed the vSTREAM virtual appliance with ASI on their servers hosting the guest services application. The vSTREAM virtual appliance, which complements existing ASI-based instrumentation deployed across the company’s global environment, is ideal for monitoring the application traffic in the cloud infrastructure to ensure availability and performance.

This has provided a holistic, vendor-agnostic view of application traffic for the IT team, across physical, virtual and cloud networks, with real-time views of end-to-end session data and network-wide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to protect the reliability and availability of networks and application services. When slowdowns or outages occur, the network, application, and cloud vendor teams can now collaborate, leveraging the same smart data to closely characterize all aspects of the services and their communications. Web-based application flows from customer devices at the resorts to backend applications located on virtualized servers in the data centers and cloud. Evaluating service dependency maps, response times, and performance metrics, the IT team is able to pinpoint the true source of the degradation.

With the NETSCOUT implementation at each resort, the IT team is evaluating performance of the guest service application, VoIP, video on demand, and Web services throughout the environment with the InfiniStream appliances and nGeniusONE. Further, they are able to test customer experience over the WiFi at the resorts using the OptiViewXG at each location, in one case even identifying a defective access point. Service assurance monitoring of their private data centers is instrumental in troubleshooting general business impacting issues, as well as those affecting customer experience. With the addition of visibility at the cloud vendor location, regardless of where a disruption may exist, the IT team has confidence in their ability to pinpoint and resolve it with this holistic coverage.

Business Value

Developing and delivering innovative digital transformations has enhanced the customers’ enjoyment at this hospitality company’s resorts. And the IT team is leveraging a broad deployment of NETSCOUT service assurance solutions to ensure it is a quality user experience. They are benefiting from holistic visibility across their resorts, private cloud data centers, and public cloud application servers, which has reduced mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) customer-impacting issues. Customer experience with the guest services application is meeting and exceeding their internal objectives. Further, they are benefiting from well-coordinated collaboration within their own network and applications teams, not to mention improved the relationship with their third party cloud provider.