Needles, Haystacks, and Performance Management for Manufacturers

Modern manufacturing facilities remain competitive via consistency and innovation. To maintain this, they need to respond quickly to interruptions in their digital infrastructure. But troubleshooting unexpected IT system performance degradations and outages at global manufacturers can be something like searching for needles in multiple haystacks. Any number of factors can cause incidents, leaving IT teams wondering: How big are the needles? Where are the haystacks? 

Detecting and fixing emerging network and application performance problems quickly before they severely affect processes, employees, and customers is one of the best ways to protect a company’s bottom line. This is where network and application performance management comes in.

Shrinking Those Haystacks 
Performance management solutions are ideal for helping IT teams visualize and pinpoint the location and type of problems (the needles) and fix them, assuring network availability and performance across manufacturing ecosystems—any application, any cloud, any data center, any factory—anywhere in the world. Stretching the metaphor, it can help IT teams shrink haystacks (remote environments, distributed data centers, applications, services, devices, and so forth) and remove needles without disturbing another piece of hay.

As manufacturers become increasingly more digitally sophisticated, they become more dependent on applications, services, and technologies to orchestrate their entire manufacturing process—from initial design through production—with everything from sales, service, shipping, and billing in the mix. A disruption anywhere in the process can jeopardize product delivery, regulatory compliance, product quality, profit, customer satisfaction, and even brand reputation.

Finding Needles: The Right Technology Helps 
Manufacturers are great at building things. They are learning to become great at optimizing them. 

According to a recent industry outlook, manufacturers are accelerating their investments in connected and predictive technologies to improve internal processes and increase day-to-day efficiency. Machine-to-machine communications, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices, manufacturing execution systems (MES), unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) tools, artificial intelligence (AI), customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, and other technologies are the lexicons of modern IT war rooms. And these technologies all depend on reliable, consistent connectivity between automated systems, physical and virtual servers, remote data centers, sensors, robots, mobile devices, and remote workstations to work.

That’s potentially an awful lot of needles to find.

NETSCOUT manufacturing solutions are built to scale alongside enterprises, providing high investment value and a smooth transition path to digital transformation. Whether the manufacturing network and application ecosystem is on-premises or in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, NETSCOUT provides a single-pane-of-glass view for monitoring all applications, services, and devices running on infrastructures, regardless of location. NETSCOUT’s nGenuisONE Service Assurance solution significantly decreases mean time to repair (MTTR) while increasing mean time to knowledge (MTTK) without requiring local IT resources. 

In the fast-paced, hypercompetitive world of manufacturing, real-time performance management is critical for assuring business continuity. And it can save IT, teams a lot of time chasing needles and haystacks.

Read about how this global manufacturer leveraged NETSCOUT solutions to improve its remote site visibility and enhance manufacturing device monitoring and performance assurance across the world.