Eliminating Visibility Gaps in Government Networks Ensures Continuous Performance

  Management teams for state, provincial, and local government agencies are tasked with overseeing several critical departments with very distinct responsibilities. From emergency services to tax collection and education to unemployment, maintaining visibility into each distinct area is quite challenging. When network and application performance is impaired, there can be significant negative consequences for government agencies and residents, such as:
Issues delivering tax refunds, resulting in late payments for money that people may be counting on
Late Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) distribution, causing families distress
Prolonged filing procedures in the court system, cause deadline delays that may affect rulings
Delays issuing vehicle registrations and license renewals, therefore flagging drivers that should not be classified as “overdue”

Today’s news headlines are often riddled with horror stories about the negative impact of performance issues on major businesses—and government agencies are no exception. For example, a recent internet outage in one West Coast state affected virtually all government departments. This outage caused staff in the state’s emergency services department to resort to pen and paper for hours to manually log their calls. 

Eliminating Visibility Gaps Helps Avoid Common Problems for Local Government

With their employees heads-down on their daily responsibilities and strict limitations in place to control spending, government agencies must effectively utilize their resources to optimize performance and provide quality employee and constituent experiences for every department. Leveraging NETSCOUT’s performance management solutions allows government agencies to eliminate cross-department visibility gaps and ensure quality communications and consistent network and application performance from anywhere at any time. Solutions such as nGenius Enterprise Performance Management help government IT teams avoid the following issues, among others:

• The need to hire third-party IT resources. It can be incredibly expensive to locate, hire, and physically send third-party resources to remote government sites across distributed offices and buildings to track down the source of degradation and outages.
• Losing time with inefficient finger-pointing. Without streamlined troubleshooting processes, IT teams can spend hours going in circles between their internal teams and third-party vendors to identify the true root cause of slowdowns. The network operations center (NOC) and IT helpdesk can significantly reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by swiftly identifying the source of performance issues and effectively triaging them for resolution.
• Costly capacity planning issues. Not unlike other industries, government agencies are often managing resource constraints and personnel limitations. With the right technology in place, they are able to eliminate bottlenecks and better understand where traffic is coming from to accurately align capacity to utilization. With increased performance visibility, IT teams can make proactive and seasonal adjustments to improve efficiency, for example, during tax season when the tax office needs more resources to meet filing deadlines.
• Unplanned downtime. Network and application performance outages can have serious implications for government agencies. Emergency responders, for example, may have difficulty connecting with citizens or other government departments to provide the swift assistance needed in an emergency situation.

Providing Positive User Experiences Throughout the Community with NETSCOUT

Maintaining a safe community and delivering reliable communications to the public is a top priority for most government agencies. Using InfiniStreamNG appliances and the nGeniusONE solution, government agencies can gather NETSCOUT Smart Data and packet-level insights into performance at each department. This end-through-end visibility allows IT teams to continuously monitor traffic in data centers, remote sites, internal sites, and SD-WAN locations, closing visibility gaps and improving efficiency. By proactively testing critical internet connections, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) quality, unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) applications, and more, government agencies can ensure positive digital experiences for employees and constituents.

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions help government agencies deliver best-in-class digital user experiences to employees or constituents located anywhere, at any time. With the assurance that their networks and mission-critical applications are performing effectively, agencies can focus on safeguarding the community and providing constituents with the reliable support they deserve—whether it is swiftly registering a new vehicle at the DMV or receiving SNAP benefits in a timely fashion.

Learn more about how this county government’s IT team used NETSCOUT’s packet-based solutions to monitor SD-WAN performance and provide quality user experiences to employees and constituents across the county.