Global Manufacturer Benefits from Quality Performance of DX Technologies

Customer Profile

This multi-billion-dollar high-tech global manufacturing company has a legacy and culture of innovation. With 30,000 employees in multiple subsidiaries operating in over 15 countries, the IT division manages an extremely complex network that is critical to continued business success.

In addition to managing the existing network, IT also takes the lead to research and implement new technologies that enable and support ongoing technology advancements. Their work supports the company’s innovations and directly impacts the competitive advantages in the market.

The Challenge

IT management had a strategic plan to upgrade all their locations to the latest technologies, specifically to proactively manage communications services and business critical applications. Over the course of the last few years, the manufacturer had increased their corporate network from 1 GB to 10 GB in many locations, implemented several Software-as-a-Service applications, including Microsoft® Office 365 and Skype for Business, and upgraded their voice and video services to Polycom. The investments in these new technologies were approved at the executive level of the company and were expected to operate with high quality end user experience. However, as is often the case, issues did arise that impacted users and required IT intervention to pinpoint and correct.

At the same time, IT was confronted with a shortage of people and process necessary to proactively monitor the network and quickly isolate and resolve issues. The resources available to support monitoring and managing their current tools had declined, leading to changes being made that broke the data collection, which caused gaps in visibility.

Solution in Action

The company was using NETSCOUT® nGeniusONE in a few locations to gather important packet data, but they did not have processes to keep the service and dashboards updated. IT management, with positive input from the NETSCOUT users, decided to expand their NETSCOUT solution to all locations, with each type of location, i.e. call-center, fabrication center, etc.., having a standard deployment configuration. The manufacturer had recently started outsourcing some of their noncore competency activities and decided to leverage NETSCOUT’s nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS) offering to manage their deployment.

To gain even more visibility and data sources, IT added nGeniusPULSE with virtual and hardware nPoints and Packet Flow Switch (PFS). They soon discovered multiple uses for nGeniusPULSE, starting with using the SMNP testing to look at router stats and verify there were no errors or dropped packets; drilling down to the network component level to isolate root-cause of issues; and seeing CPU utilization from switches. Synthetic tests are used to monitor the availability and performance of applications including hosted and cloud-based apps including Microsoft Office 365®. PFS allows multiple IT groups to aggregate, replicate, and manage the flows of traffic throughout the network for application performance monitoring, unified communication, and security.

NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service (nVaaS) was engaged by the company to address their challenges with people and processes. The nVaas team configured and optimized the NETSCOUT deployment, built and mapped critical application services in nGeniusONE. The users have custom built dashboards with intuitive navigation and the Executives have their own custom dashboards that provide a single pane-of glass visibility of the health of their IT environment and performance of their business-critical applications.

The Results

With the help of the nVaaS team several benefits were realized immediately: full visibility to the Skype for Business service used by Executives in one of their largest facilities; and monitoring WAN connectivity between interconnected facilities to determine bandwidth usage. In the design and manufacturing divisions, IT identified network dependencies and made adjustments that improved performance of a business-critical, custom application that had a history of end-user complaints.

The combination of actions the company has taken, together with NETSCOUT, has expanded visibility at Data Centers and other locations and helped them improve delivery and performance of key applications that impact users at all locations. IT has streamlined vendor management and simplified internal training by consolidating tools and using the nGeniusONE platform and nGeniusPULSE for multiple monitoring and analysis requirements.

The availability of expertise from the nVaaS team with 24/7 monitoring and alerts, has helped reduce the Mean-Time-to-Knowledge at the point of failure or degradation. With nVaaS, the company has benefited from the strategic, actionable insights into the data available in reports, dashboards and granular views, to improve their decisionmaking process for bandwidth and network planning. This is making the budget process more accurate and achievable as well. IT has improved the effectiveness and efficiency of people and process by leveraging nVaaS services, freeing resources and time to focus on technology innovations to support and grow the business.