Overview
Deliver Visibility and Protection Across Your Manufacturing Ecosystem
In manufacturing, Industry 4.0 is advancing intelligent digital technologies into manufacturing and industrial processes. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics, and hybrid infrastructure environments are deeply integrated throughout the production environment. As information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) converge, manufacturers gain unmatched visibility, data-driven analytics, and automation capabilities that form the foundation of today's smart factories.
In these highly connected OT environments, reliability is not just about uptime; it is about deterministic performance and even the smallest slowdowns or major disruptions can snowball into production losses, quality issues, or safety incidents. However, increased connectivity expands the attack surface, making cybersecurity gaps and network and application performance issues dangerous threats to operational continuity. Manufacturers need end-to-end security and network observability to maintain operations, product quality, and resilience as digital initiatives grow.
Trusted by industry leaders worldwide
Challenges
Manage Risk and Performance in Always-on Manufacturing Operations
Lack of Comprehensive End-to-End Visibility
As digital projects accelerate, legacy point tools lag in scope and scale. Gaps in IT and OT visibility slows troubleshooting, prolongs outages, and delays issue resolution across factories, networks, and applications.
Distributed Systems Expand the Attack Surface
Cyber-attacks can trigger production stoppages, safety risks, and regulatory penalties. As OT systems increasingly connect to enterprise IT and public cloud, they create additional paths for exploitation and increase operational risk.
Costly Reactive Troubleshooting in Downtime-Intolerant OT Networks
Unplanned downtime has financial risks: halting production, delaying shipments, and eroding revenue. Minor network or application performance degradations can be just as damaging as full outages.
Business Continuity Throughout Digital Transformations to Industry 4.0
High-profile Industry 4.0 projects falter when networks, OT/IT environments, or migration strategies aren’t ready. Without consistent visibility before, during, and after transformations, manufacturers risk delays, unexpected costs, and business continuity disruptions.
Complexity Securing and Maintaining Performance of IIoT and Smart Devices
Connected devices across supply chain and production are essential to automated manufacturing and disruptions impact output and safety. Quickly pinpointing the source to an IT performance or security threat makes proactive end-to-end observability key.
Outcomes That Matter
What Manufacturers Gain With Visibility and Protection Across Modern Environments
Avoid or Reduce Costly Production Downtime
IT teams can quickly identify and resolve issues network-wide, for any application, with actionable insights that reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), improve reliability, and protect production continuity.
Reduce Cyber Incident Financial Impact
With rapid detection and response across IT and OT environments, IT can reduce the risk of lateral movement and prevent operational disruption.
Enable Safe Digital Transformation to Industry 4.0
With continuous monitoring of performance, availability, and security, manufacturers can scale digital transformation confidently and minimizes operational risk.
Eliminate Tool Sprawl and Reduce Licensing Costs
Consolidating into a single, vendor-agnostic, end-to-end solution improves uptime, reduces operational risk across factories and hybrid cloud, and lowers licensing and management costs.
Protect and Extend the Value of Existing and Future Investments
Future-proof capital investments and optimize ROI with observability and security solutions that meet today’s operational needs and tomorrow's growth.
Use Cases
Observability and Security Insights for Manufacturing Companies
Manufacturing organizations using NETSCOUT improve operational resilience, reduce risk, and help improve the success of their digital initiatives.
What Our Customers Are Saying
"We use NETSCOUT to confidently deploy and secure applications and services across physical, virtual, and cloud environments by delivering smarter analytics to intelligently pinpoint data, network, session, and application elements that are causing performance problems."
– IT Analyst, Medium Enterprise Industrial Manufacturing Company
Resources
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What Manufacturing OT applications need to be included in proactive observability strategies?
Application performance from a network vantage point provides holistic insights into application behavior, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact latency and loss. This is particularly important for manufacturing IT applications like ERP, CRM, supply chain services, cloud services, and collaboration tools, that are critical in supporting production and operations. These are just some of the over 1,000 applications NETSCOUT supports. By correlating application service activity in real-time with enterprise-wide views, IT teams gain an accurate understanding of application performance and user experience for faster root-cause identification, reduced service restoration times, and lower MTTR.
What Manufacturing IT applications should to be part of proactive observability processes?
Comprehensive monitoring and analysis, leveraging a network vantage point, provides critical insights into OT application behavior, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact performance, latency, errors, and packet loss. This is critically important for manufacturing OT applications like Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Materials Resource Planning (MRP), Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and automated manufacturing systems.
How Can NETSCOUT help with user experience and performance issues in remote factories?
NETSCOUT supports observability at remote factories for manufacturers around the world that benefit from the comprehensive user experience, network and application performance visibility we provide. NETSCOUT’s nGenius solutions for observability deliver proactive monitoring for synthetic testing and deep packet inspection for IT organizations to move beyond reactive troubleshooting into more predictive and preventative postures which is critical to the latency sensitive production processes found in modern Industry 4.0 remote factories.
How does NETSCOUT performance analysis of critical manufacturing OT application differ from competitors’ tools?
NETSCOUT's patented ASI technology, or Smart Data, delivers IP intelligence and metadata derived from packets. It recognizes over a thousand applications "out of the box," including critical manufacturing OT applications like MES and SCADA, as well as provides flexible configuration options to support custom applications. NETSCOUT is the only solution to provide such flexibility.
How does NETSCOUT support Zero Trust and security in manufacturing operations?
Security and Zero Trust initiatives are powered by NETSCOUT’s Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, including Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Omnis CyberStream, which provide packet-level insights for validating network segmentation, monitoring policy enforcement, and investigating suspicious activity. It gives organizations insights into real network behavior to identify lateral movement and control gaps across hybrid environments.
How does NETSCOUT protect the availability of manufacturing operations?
NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution provides manufacturers with multilayer DDoS protection that stops attacks at the edge, scales in the cloud, and adapts in real time. By combining always-on, on-premises mitigation with cloud-scale capacity and AI-driven intelligence, NETSCOUT protects critical manufacturing IT and OT services from all attack types and sizes.
