Government Agency Assures User Experience with Visibility Into Judicial and Healthcare Services

Customer Profile

This regional government services agency has vast responsibilities associated with delivering government operations and services to more than 10 million citizens in support of healthcare, education, court / judicial system, and transportation. It is also responsible for the overall governmental human resources functions, including pay and benefits for tens of thousands of their employees. 

Like many government agencies supporting consumer or constituent services, the COVID-19 pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities regarding their digital services. With the Agency charged with providing critical support for consumer regulatory and compliance requirements, motor vehicle registration and personal license renewals, health insurance support, and payroll responsibilities, the efficient operation of their application services and data centers was essential. 

 The Challenge 

The Agency had been a NETSCOUT customer for several years when the IT organization was preparing to initiate major, strategic, digital transformations. As they planned their data center projects, including cloud deployments, they became concerned about a lack of visibility to troubleshoot performance degradations and outages with their 1,800 applications across a hybrid cloud deployment. 

They were also facing some new challenges in some of the Agency’s key constituent services that became problematic during the COVID-19 directives to remain at home. 

• The Judiciary Agency had a document management system (DMS) application that was used by attorneys to download and upload case files during trials that was experiencing  significant issues with performance. As the degradation issues were affecting more attorneys and causing increasingly longer downloads, it was directly causing delays in starting court and trials on time. IT knew this was a critical issue to investigate and resolve. 
• For supporting the Vaccine Registration Sign-Ups coming into the new year, as COVID-19 vaccines were approved, the Agency was responsible for establishing vaccine registration and scheduling services for millions of the region’s citizens. Leveraging a combination of third-party vendors for the vaccine application, registration, and front-end, as well as select data center resources, the IT team recognized a pronounced gap in visibility to assure performance and availability of the Websites and applications for the community. 

Their last concern regarded Internal IT resources that were already stretched thin as they supported existing employees, constituents, and current IT infrastructure and services. With the added burden of supporting shifting workforce dynamics with thousands of employees working from home, while simultaneously engaging in a major digital transformation to cloud resources, they recognized outsourcing might be required to help support some of their troubleshooting requirements. 

Solution in Action

The Agency first added to its existing NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance Solution to address their high-profile challenges in the following manner: 

• nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) for Certified 7000 Series Packet Brokers, for forwarding packet data from the network downstream to the NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG smart data appliances, as well as other monitoring tools used by the Agency. 
• InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) 9800 series software appliances implemented in the data center to provide monitoring of the Judiciary application.
• nGeniusPULSE and nPoint testing devices were used to evaluate end-user experience and performance of the Web-based Vaccine Scheduling application to ensure quality digital experience for their citizens. 
• nGenius Visibility as a Service (VaaS) managed services were added to operate the NETSCOUT solution and implement the new equipment in support of the major areas of improved visibility. 

The NETSCOUT VaaS organization was able to make meaningful headway, quickly, in the two initial critical issues: 

• For the Judiciary DMS application, the VaaS team configured this application in nGeniusONE to track utilization, users, response times, and performance errors and degradations. As they then watched the trends and performance for the service, they quickly determined there was a server bottleneck issue on one of the application servers. Once capacity was added, the issue was resolved. 
• For the Vaccine Registration application / Website, the VaaS team implemented nPoint sensors and then created a series of business transaction tests that mimicked the steps citizens would take in setting up their vaccine appointments. As the steps were run at consistent, scheduled intervals, the VaaS team uncovered quite a few issues in all steps of the vaccination scheduling process. The VaaS and Agency IT teams worked with the application third-party provider, based on evidence for the issues revealed, to resolve the problems, regardless of whether they were in the Agency’s data center, the cloud front-end services, or the vendor’s application servers. 

The Results

As a current NETSCOUT customer, this government agency was able to extend the value of their existing investments to gain visibility into their judicial DMS application, as well as the new Web-based vaccine registration service. With the deployment of the ISNG 9000 series certified software appliances in the data center providing smart data to their nGeniusONE implementation, the agency gained the real-time monitoring and analysis needed to quickly pinpoint the issue impacting the DMS service. This critical step provided the relief necessary to ensure the courts and trials were able to resume a prompt, on-time schedule. 

As strong outsource proponents, the IT team’s use of nGenius VaaS was instrumental in accelerating time-to-value in the nGeniusPULSE and nPoint solution and reducing the time to resolve (MTTR) issues that emerged with the Web-based vaccine registration system. Again, as a critical constituent service, ensuring quality end-user experience was achieved with this combined effort. 

Finally, from a financial perspective, the agency also benefited from improved cost efficiencies, with both the ISNG and nGenius PFS being available as commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software options. The valued visibility partnership with NETSCOUT has been expanded to include outsourcing services and packet broker technology, reducing complexity and costs otherwise associated with multiple vendors. Finally, it improves the value in the financial investments they had already made in nGeniusONE technology that is continuing to be instrumental in these latest initiatives.