Major Grocery Chain Assures Delivery of Customer Loyalty Program with TruView Solution

Customer Profile

This major North American food and drug retailer is a highly-recognized name in the industry, offering a wide range of products at a fair price both online and in stores across the country. In business for close to a century, this retailer has always focused on delivering value to their customers. A constant innovator, they’re always looking for new ways to enrich their customer’s experience. With almost 200,000 employees supporting over a thousand stores in more than a third of the US, this retailer uses a number of different complex multi-tier applications to keep the business running and customers happy.

Business Challenge

In the low-margin grocery business, every sale is crucial and every customer interaction is vital to the long-term viability of the organization. A key differentiator for the business was the introduction of a new customer loyalty program. In order to be first-to-market with this program, IT was under tremendous pressure to overcome application slowness issues that threatened the rollout.

For the IT team, using packet analysis tools to try and track down the slowness issues individually was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Often, the network team was being blamed for issues that turned out to not be network-related. In addition to jeopardizing the leadership team’s Management By Objectives (MBO) program, which was dependent on a successful on-time deployment of the new customer loyalty program, IT was responsible for almost 100 other applications, supporting both store services and the distribution centers. Disruptions to the network were viewed as potentially devastating to the business and a major nightmare for IT.

NETSCOUT Solution

To optimize application performance, the retailer’s IT team turned to NETSCOUT. An Enterprise-class TruView Central server fed by Flow Collectors placed in the two main datacenters allowed IT to trace session transactions and reveal network performance metrics. TruView provides visibility into application traffic between the stores and datacenters.

Rapid drilldowns and session traces allow the IT team to investigate problem reports quickly and generate accurate reports for key stakeholders. All of network engineering now uses these tools to segment problems and collect evidence to be shared in escalations.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

NETSCOUT’s TruView solution enables IT to pinpoint the source of application slowdowns. By mapping transactions end-to-end throughout the network, TruView uncovers the source of delays or packet loss issues. IT is now able to demonstrate when a server hits a zero window size, or the client is receiving too much data back from the server but doesn’t have enough memory to process it.

Once an issue is reported, the Network Operations Center (NOC) is able to investigate immediately and have all the information needed to triage and escalate to the correct team. And with nearly 100 applications now configured, including mission critical customer loyalty and distribution center applications, IT can achieve service assurance for all of them which is vital for protecting the business.

Business Value

The NETSCOUT solution, relying on the TruView Central server, fed by Flow Collectors, has enabled the IT team to ensure network performance and reliability. With so many applications monitored by the system, IT can prioritize investigating the applications that are most important such as Distribution to minimize business downtime.

The retailer’s customer loyalty program was successfully deployed on-time thanks to insights gained from the NETSCOUT solution. IT has been able to improve the response time of the loyalty app, making it faster and more predictable.

In addition, the application teams have been able to improve and optimize the company’s most important applications based on data collected and analyzed by NETSCOUT. As a result of this powerful solution, IT is now able to streamline new application rollouts, enabling them to be successful on the first try. NETSCOUT has also provided the critical insights needed to improve the company’s network capacity planning, allowing IT to right-size their WAN.