Case Study

Government Agency Assures Performance Quality During Cloud Migration

ECS_363_EN-2101

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Major digital transformations created gaps in performance visibility 
  • Needed to assure performance before and after citizen-impacting application migrations 
The Soluton
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance and nGenius® for Flows 
  • Certified InfiniStreamNG® software appliances and nGenius Collectors 
  • nGenius® Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) for Certified 5000 & 7000 Series Packet Brokers 
  • NETSCOUT® Visibility as a Service (VaaS) 
The Results
  • Protected quality performance during application migration 
  • Improved collaboration with a single pane of glass analysis 
  • Accelerated time to value with nGenius VaaS managed service support 

Customer Profile

This agency provides centralized information technology (IT) services to all regional government bureaus, departments, and divisions. They manage the network, applications, unified communications platforms, wide area network (WAN) connectivity, cloud services, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers used in delivering services to residents and regional visitors. 

  • The IT team manages a complex enterprise environment supporting: 
  • Dozens of bureaus and agency departments 
  • Approximately ten million citizens 
  • Numerous data centers and remote locations 
  • Hundreds of well-known and custom applications 
  • Variety of hosted, Web-based, and SaaS applications, 

For years, the agency understood the value of performance management and knew it was essential to assure quality for their government services and applications. Their recent major investment in technology innovations and digital transformations was yet another area to assure quality end-user experience. 

The Challenge

Recently, this regional government prioritized major investments in technology innovations and digital transformations to ensure citizens and employees could seamlessly perform government services digitally. This technology modernization will enable car registrations, public and higher education services, citizen health record access, tax filings, and judicial brief submissions to all be performed online. 

Some of the committed projects included: 

  • Migration of applications from private data centers to Microsoft Azure (Azure) and Amazon Web Service (AWS). 
  • Redesign of core transit network between all agencies to Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), with increased access capacity as appropriate. 
  • Upgraded Internet access for all offices, including link capacity changes as necessary. 

The infrastructure operations team responsible for executing these enhancements knew from the planning stages that the digital enhancements would mean greater complexity, more vendors, and increased opportunity for performance issues to emerge. Their previous tools for network and application performance management were outdated and lacked the capabilities to support the new initiatives, which led to a focused search for sophisticated service assurance technology to provide visibility throughout the new digital environment. 

Due to the overwhelming nature of the several digital transformations the Agency had undertaken, they were also planning to engage a managed service approach to the network and application performance project. This would enable staff to continue to focus on the strategic projects, while the managed service organization would concentrate on installation, implementation, and ongoing triage and reporting task areas. 

Solution in Action

Following a rigorous search and evaluation, the Agency selected NETSCOUT to support their new initiatives. NETSCOUT became a standout during the evaluation phase due to a major factor -comprehensive, integrated, unified solution from a single vendor supporting the critical requirements of the project, including capabilities for: 

  • Simultaneous, single pane of glass analysis of both Packet and NetFlow-based data. 
  • Monitoring in multiple infrastructure platforms - public and private cloud, virtualized environments, SD-WAN, 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. 
  • Comprehensive, inclusive application monitoring capability, including well-known protocols & applications, Web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), unified communications & collaboration (UC&C) services, Unified Communications-as-a- Service (UCaaS), and video applications. 
  • Both performance management and packet broker technologies, with interoperable functionality. 
  • 24 x 7 x 365 Managed Service support. 
  • The Agency is implementing their newly acquired NETSCOUT technologies to gain critical visibility throughout the digital infrastructure. Specific design plans included: 
  • In their two primary data centers, the IT team is deploying nGeniusONE Service Assurance Solution, nGenius for Flows, and the nGeniusONE Stand-by Server for always-available network and application performance management. 
  • NETSCOUT nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) software for certified PFS 5100s and 7100s is being deployed in each data center to access traffic data from the network and switches to distribute to downstream security tools and NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances for performance assurance. 
  • The IT team has selected a variety of ISNG models to provide real-time monitoring and analysis into network and applications in strategic 1GB, 10GB, or 100GB segments as appropriate in the data center and at key Bureau locations. This visibility for troubleshooting and analysis is critical in the new high-speed, multi-vendor environment to reduce the time to investigate and resolve citizen- and employee-affecting degradations. 
  • nGenius 3400 series Collectors for NetFlow to gain additional application-level utilization information and trending across their new SD-WAN deployment used for communications with remote agencies, divisions, ministries, and bureau offices. Planning for capacity changes and budget adjustments will be easier and more precise with evidence-based, trended details over time with the NetFlow data. 
  • NETSCOUT’s innovative Visibility as a Service (VaaS) managed service support is helping deploy the solution, configure monitored applications, establish alerting thresholds and troubleshooting dashboards, and create executive-level reports. Triaging issues as they arise is now performed by the NETSCOUT VaaS team, who provides expert analysis of the disruption and, based on best practices, suggests remediation efforts, freeing Agency staff to focus on moving strategic digital projects forward.