Hospitality Assures Quality Customer Experience and Protects Revenue in the Cloud

Customer Profile

This U.S.-based, multi-national hospitality corporation manages and franchises a broad portfolio of lodging and hotel facilities under dozens of brands in more than 120 countries worldwide. From humble beginnings nearly a century ago, this company now boasts billions in revenue with the support of more than 200,000 employees hosting millions of travelers at thousands of properties dedicated to creating high quality customer experiences.

Business Challenge

In the hospitality business, customer experience is paramount. For this multi-national corporation, reliability of its website, inventory management application, credit card authorization system, and frequent buyer programs are critical to the bottom-line. Following a recent acquisition, the company’s IT team faced the significant challenge of delivering service assurance across two different data center environments in order to ensure vital services were always on.

This meant effectively monitoring private data centers and new third-party cloud-based data centers, as well as the company’s website and reservation applications that were running 24/7. Any degradations and outages could result in millions in lost revenue in a matter of minutes. IT was truly under the gun to find a viable solution.

NETSCOUT Solution

As a long-time partner, the hospitality corporation was already utilizing the NETSCOUT solution across its private network. However, the recently acquired company had different network management tools in use. After careful review, it was determined that NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, InfiniStreamNG™ appliances, vSCOUT software-based instrumentation, and nGenius 3900 series packet flow switches would become the basis of a comprehensive visibility and service assurance solution going forward.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

A combination of the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, InfiniStream appliances, and vSCOUT software were chosen because of the value of patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) and smart analytics. nGenius packet flow switches were used to feed network traffic to the InfiniStream appliances, giving IT the ability to continuously monitor the applications to ensure availability and performance.

Because the physical data centers and the third-party cloud-broker data centers rely heavily on virtualization, vSCOUT software was the ideal choice to reside on the operating system alongside monitored services for analysis of the company’s application services where traditional packet acquisition techniques had proven to be impractical. In this particular case, the hospitality corporation is deploying the vSCOUT on the web application servers. Reducing the complexity of this multi-cloud environment, vSCOUT and nGeniusONE discovers service dependencies across application, compute and network workloads, like web, database, DNS, Active Directory and DHCP services, that may impact performance of the applications they support. Using actionable insight to quickly triage the root cause of application slowdowns and outages has made working with the cloud broker more effective to quickly resolve service issues.

Business Value

The NETSCOUT solution has delivered on its promise for cost-effective, pervasive visibility across hybrid cloud environments for this hospitality company. The IT team is now able to effectively monitor and proactively diagnose network issues. Reports are generated daily for upper management, showing the overall health of the network, including application responsiveness, bandwidth utilization and link usage.

With the critical insights gained, IT has been able to achieve lower mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) when diagnosing network issues, which has dramatically reduced downtime in the reservation system, in turn protecting millions in potential revenue for the business. At the same time, IT is now able to optimize service performance and minimize costs while simultaneously ensuring the highest quality customer experience that protects the hard-earned reputation of the company.