Manufacturer Assures Successful Migration of Key Applications to AWS Cloud

Customer Profile

This worldwide equipment manufacturer, based in the U.S., builds agricultural, construction, and forestry equipment in more than 100 facilities spread across 30 countries. More than 60,000 employees deliver product design, development, production, and sales services, helping the business achieve annual revenues topping tens of billions of dollars. This takes coordination, communications, and collaboration on a global scale. They have come to depend heavily on the efficient, continuous operation of their networked application resources throughout regionally distributed data centers. To ensure quality operation of these applications, they have partnered with NETSCOUT^® for nGeniusONE service assurance solutions to ensure high-quality application performance and end-user experience. 

The Challenge

This manufacturer was in the process of migrating some critical business services to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and implementing a new Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosting environment in the primary data center. As they already relied heavily on nGeniusONE visibility in their on-premises environment, they immediately targeted both their AWS and ISP Hosting environments for additional visibility to ensure a consistent highest quality end-to-end visibility in the hybrid cloud. Critically important to their day-to-day operations were key business services, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP, sales operations, inventory management, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. If any of these applications experience slowdowns or disruptions before, during or after the migration process, the impact on revenue, production, and customer service can become significant. 

As the IT staff were developing their plans for implementing nGeniusONE service assurance in these new enterprise areas, the world was in its earliest stages of dealing with the possibility of dramatically increased remote workers/work-at-home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This added to both the importance and urgency of adding visibility for performance analysis for the ISP hosting environment, given the possibility of having tens of thousands of employees working from home around the world. 

Solution in Action

Visibility and service assurance with nGeniusONE had become part of the standard process for the IT team at this manufacturer for assuring successful migration of application workloads while maintaining a delightful user experience. So much so, that they were using the solution proactively to avoid potential issues. Recently, in advance of a company-wide meeting that would be carried by an internet-based, Hive streaming-video communications system, the team acted to ensure a flawless experience. During the actual event, there would be thousands of their worldwide colleagues participating. So, the IT staff conducted a pre-call, during which they used nGeniusONE to monitor the test. They discovered a few issues across a couple of locations that were quickly addressed with configuration changes to ensure the QoS assignments were correct to deliver the quality they needed for the actual executive video communication session.

Simultaneous to the delivery of this company video conference, members of the IT planning and engineering teams were designing an nGeniusONE deployment strategy to meet their priorities for visibility across their upcoming infrastructure transformations. 

• For visibility to assure performance of key business applications that were moving to the AWS cloud, they deployed the vSTREAM virtual appliances along with a virtual nGeniusONE service assurance server. With AWS supporting their production applications, it is critical to maintain the same level of user experience their employees have come to expect. 
• To simultaneously deploy and operationalize these new investments for rapid time-to-value they added NETSCOUT’s nGenius Visibility as a Service (nGenius VaaS). The trained and experienced team of NETSCOUT experts immediately stepped in to implement, configure, and use the nGeniusONE visibility solutions. 
• For visibility to assure availability and performance of all their services across the ISP hosting environment in the data center, they added NETSCOUT Certified InfiniStreamNG 9800 Software Appliances. This visibility and intelligence have become essential with so many of their employees working from home in compliance with the COVID-19 stay-at home directives around the world. 

The Results

By extending the value of their existing investment in nGeniusONE for assuring on-premises datacenter services with the addition of new InfiniStreamNG appliances for monitoring their ISP hosting environment and vSTREAMs for monitoring AWS, this manufacturer assured the successful cloud migration of key services. And in doing so they have put in place a visibility solution to assure a high quality of experience for whatever they have to deal with going forward – employees at headquarters, factories, sales offices, or even at home. They can migrate any services with confidence by monitoring and addressing performance issues if they occur, where thousands of at home employees may be accessing corporate applications. When operations return to normal, they are confident in ensuring their user community will enjoy a seamless experience across their data center and cloud transformations. 

This manufacturer has assimilated the nGeniusONE service assurance solution as part of their standard processes and procedures to ensure visibility for quality performance and end user experience. This has enabled them to not only reduce Mean Time-to-Repair (MTTR) issues impacting their manufacturing and distribution sites, but they are also proactive in using the solution to help avoid potentially disruptive issues with critical services. Furthermore, the addition of the nGenius VaaS team was vital to enabling the manufacturer’s global services team to focus on several other projects in motion.