National Retailer Assures Service Delivery over Citrix with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This national retail chain provides customers with quality goods and services at the lowest possible prices. Annual revenue exceeds $100 billion from more than 500 operating stores in the United States and Canada serving tens of millions of customers. A long term customer, this retailer has leveraged NETSCOUT for service assurance of their data centers and e-commerce site for several years, so when they were planning to open a new hot-standby data center, they planned for additional visibility with nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform.

Business Challenge

For retailers, such as this national chain, successful delivery of critical applications and services to remote store locations is absolutely imperative in order to ensure the very best customer experience. Whether through slowdowns or outages, there can be NO OFF for these businesses. In the case of this national retailer, they depend on state-of-the-art technology throughout their distributed network to deliver vital multi-tier business applications including Citrix, SAP, Kronos, and other service applications.

When network congestion began to cause service degradations, IT faced the difficult challenge of identifying the root cause of the issues, so they could quickly resolve them before severely impacting employee productivity and customer services. Unauthorized use of applications on the company’s network also presented security risks for the business.

NETSCOUT Solution

To solve the national retailer’s network and application performance issues, IT turned to NETSCOUT. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, along with InfiniStream® appliances, were used to enable IT to quickly identify, isolate and mitigate problems responsible for causing service degradation. InfiniStream appliances are instrumented throughout the retailer’s data centers to provide end-to-end visibility into both the Citrix and applications environments.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

The nGeniusONE solution provides customized dashboard views of the IT environment, offering at-a-glance insights from the high-level regional perspective down to service performance at each individual store. The company relies on Citrix for access to all their corporate applications from the stores; this includes SAP, employee schedules and time sheets, and customer service applications. With nGeniusONE, the retailer’s IT staff can help them determine wither a performance degradation is observed as a problem with Citrix or with the application itself. This is saving them hours of time and significantly lowers mean-time-to-restore (MTTR) services to the stores.

NETSCOUT’s expanded level of visibility allows IT teams to identify unauthorized network usage consuming excess bandwidth and shut it down. Prior to this solution, the company was unaware that employees were using thin clients for personal use, streaming video during work hours, causing a spike in traffic and degradation across the system. With insights gained through nGeniusONE, unsanctioned network usage was effectively locked down.

Business Value

Since implementing the NETSCOUT solution, this national retailer has enjoyed significant benefits. As a result, IT has gained expanded visibility into critical applications and services and is now able to rapidly identify service degradations and conduct critically important root cause analysis, allowing for reduced mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). This powerful solution also promotes cross-team collaboration, driving further efficiencies across the entire IT organization.

By using a single monitoring solution to replace a grab bag of previous tools, the retailer has saved $1.5 million over four years.