Government Agency Ensures Quality On-Line Citizen Experience

Customer Profile

As the country’s tax, payment, and customs authority, this national tax and fees agency’s prime responsibility is for collection of money owed to the government. As one of the largest governmental departments, this agency is focused on income tax, customs duties and value added tax (VAT) collection. They also coordinate delivery of a diverse set of programs, provide administration of the government’s banking system, and protect the country’s interests in international trade, just to name a few.

The agency operates a high-volume business that touches nearly every person and business in the country. With a significant number of offices and several contact centers to support citizens’ needs, they depend heavily on the efficiency and quality of their enterprise network and digital services to conduct business effectively.

The Challenge

The challenges facing this agency’s IT team were similar to that of many other companies and government agencies undertaking major data center transformations. They were moving from a third-party, dedicated infrastructure to their own data center with a virtualized environment and utilizing cloud resources. This was expected to result in their ability to modernize application services, optimize capacity to meet seasonal business peaks, provide greater reliability by leveraging a multi-cloud deployment, and deliver overall reductions in IT costs.

They also saw another cost-saving opportunity with this strategy. Over the years, in the legacy environment, several network and application monitoring tools had been acquired to manage targeted parts of the network or specific applications and these came with expensive annual maintenance costs. In many cases the tools had aged out and would not be able to support the new data center deployment so they were scheduled for retirement, which would reduce expenses. Bottom line, the agency was striving to control costs with their data center transformation, but not at the expense of a quality online experience for their citizens and staff.

The complexity of their new hybrid-cloud environment, which included high-speed 40/100GB segments as well as critical enduser related applications, made ensuring a seamless experience for individuals and businesses a top priority. The IT tooling team were dedicated to implementing the visibility necessary to ensure the network and application services were secure, responsive, and without delay.

Solution in Action

In response to these challenges, the agency defined a thorough set of requirements for strategic network and application service assurance along with a rigorous evaluation of several tools, ultimately choosing NETSCOUT® technology for service assurance visibility. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution for enterprisewide monitoring and analysis was selected to provide insights and rapid diagnosis of issues that could impact performance or availability of the agency’s application services. They developed a plan to deploy:

• InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) software appliances featuring NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence® (ASI) technology that leverages real-time, packet-based monitoring of north-south traffic in network segments, which provides actionable, smart data. The vSTREAM virtual appliances will monitor east-west based traffic running within the agency’s virtualized environment.
• To aggregate and distribute the network packet traffic from key network vantage points in the agency’s environment to the ISNG appliances, the IT team implemented the cost-effective, nGenius 5010 and 5100 Series Packet Flow Switches on COTS appliances.
• For remote monitoring, the IT tools team deployed virtual nGenius 3300 series Collectors for NetFlow.
• The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with nGenius for Flows combines the NetFlow data from the nGenius Collectors with the smart data from ISNG appliances for smart analytics related to application and traffic usage, performance and errors, service dependencies and mappings, dashboards, and troubleshooting workflows.

The metrics collected from all the NETSCOUT smart data sources revealed in nGeniusONE enable the IT team to triage, track, trend, alarm, and report on the successful migration of services to the new data centers. As issues arise, the information can be used by network operations for troubleshooting to, as quickly as possible, pinpoint the source of the disruption, both during and after transition.

In providing out-of-the-box support for 1,000+ voice, video, and data applications, combining both packet and NetFlow data, nGeniusONE is uniquely suited to provide proactive network and application performance management for the agency’s business critical applications, enterprise-wide.

The Results

The agency’s IT team knew they could gain control and reduce costs with their strategic data center transformation while simultaneously maintaining high-quality user experience by implementing a cost-effective network and application performance assurance solution. The agency is achieving this goal with smart, data-driven insights into network and application performance throughout the new hybrid cloud environment with the NETSCOUT solution. This is essential to maintaining seamless access to the agency’s business delivery of tax, customs, and other services.

Further, the agency is increasing departmental cross-collaboration and reducing the number of vendors and silospecific tools, which saves maintenance costs. It also maximizes IT efficiencies by using a single-solution approach to truly pinpoint the source of user-impacting disruptions and slowdowns, while reducing the mean time to restore (MTTR) services to efficient operation.

Long-term, with visibility and analytics in place, the agency expects to meet its main objective of high-quality delivery of digital services to its citizens in a cost-effective manner.