Hospitality Gains Visibility to Deliver Quality Guest-Facing Services with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This resort is part of a major global hospitality and entertainment company based in the U.S., generating $10 billion in revenue annually. With thousands of rooms on more than several acres of property, the resort prides itself on delivering a premier digital experience from anywhere for their tens of thousands of annual customers. It starts before they even arrive on site, with a stellar Web portal and on-line reservation experience. When an alternate hotel is just a click away, slowdowns are simply unacceptable in this business. Once on property, performance of guest services, from rooms, conference floors, and over Wi-Fi, across the campus is a key concern for their IT organization, especially in a climate that thrives on consumer reviews and social media posts – both good and bad! 

The Challenge

Proving their commitment to superior digital experience for their users, this company was implementing several data center transformations, among them - migration to Cisco ACI technology, transition to a Software as a Service application for their reservations application, and enhancements in their contact centers and Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) services for guests speaking with service representatives. During the migration to ACI in their data center, the IT staff needed to troubleshoot a couple of Severity 1 incidents. It was challenging, time-consuming, and put the quality of guests experience at risk. The IT organization quickly recognized the need for in-depth visibility to pinpoint the source of these disruptions. 

Solution in Action

Following a thorough review and evaluation, the IT staff selected nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform along with several NETSCOUT Certified InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) Software Appliances and vSTREAM virtual appliances for visibility into their new data center and SaaS services. nGeniusONE is an enterprise-wide solution that relies on NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology found in the ISNG family of appliances. This technology, which leverages packet data for fast, context-based, vendor-independent analysis, feeds the nGeniusONE platform for real-time analysis of issues impacting application performance.

In order to gain quick time to value for their new nGeniusONE solution, the IT staff also incorporated NETSCOUT’s nGenius Visibility as a Service (nGenius VaaS), which operates like an extension of their own IT team. nGenius VaaS is a team of nGeniusONE experts that operates the hospitality’s nGeniusONE solution and performs proactive monitoring, analysis, alerting, and collaborative troubleshooting. The nGenius VaaS team triages alerts for potential developing issues and working with the resort’s IT staff provides facts-based evidence from the NETSCOUT solution as to the root cause of the issue and recommendations for resolution.

Some of the issues the VaaS team, in collaboration with the company’s IT team have already resolved using the nGeniusONE deployment includes: 

• Discovered the source of an issue with their Web browser by monitoring application error codes 
• Uncovered a bad gateway that was slowing access to one of their application services 
• Pinpointed the locations that the WannaCry virus had infected using service dependency maps 
• Uncovered quality of service (QoS) mismatch issues monitoring their voice services to the contact centers with nGeniusONE 

The Results

Reducing the Mean-Time-to-Resolve (MTTR) issues with their reservation, voice, and other services that can impact their guests’ experiences has been the biggest benefit to this resort. Ability to make reservations, see room inventory and pricing, have a quality conversation with a representative, and isolating the effects of a virus are all critical to assuring the guest experience. The faster they can see and address these issues helps minimize the user’s impact and hopefully avoid an extended, catastrophic outage. 

Harnessing the expertise from the nGenius VaaS team with 24/7 monitoring and alerts has helped reduce the Mean-Time-to- Knowledge (MTTK) at the point of failure or degradation. With nGenius VaaS, the company has benefited from the strategic, actionable insights into the data available in reports, dashboards, and granular views to improve their proactive troubleshooting, as well as informed decision-making for digital transformation architecture planning. IT has improved the effectiveness and efficiency of people and process by leveraging nGenius VaaS services, freeing resources and time to focus on technology innovations to improve services and optimize budgets. 

For a company whose primary goal is to provide a quality experience to their business travelers and vacationing guests, they are ensuring that technology issues do not become a frustration by leveraging the latest in NETSCOUT solutions.