When IT Is Left in the Dark, Utility Customer Experience Suffers

Many energy and utility companies have been making significant investments in digital technology with the goal of improving service, driving revenue, and enhancing the customer experience. With an ever-greater reliance on networks and applications, IT professionals face mission-critical challenges in assuring the performance and security of these vital systems.

When operational technology (OT) networks are disrupted, power delivery can be interrupted. IT is then under pressure to determine if the problem is due to the network infrastructure, a server, or an application. How quickly the problem can be identified will determine how fast service can be restored. On top of this, IT is tasked with protecting investments, such as new communication technologies including 5G, VoIP to the substations, or mobile apps that communicate with advanced metering systems. When these communication channels fail, IT must quickly diagnose the problems.

In addition, energy and power companies all have regulatory compliance requirements that mandate monitoring and reporting on scheduled and unscheduled outages as well as performance and/or security disruptions. Failure to meet these requirements can result in costly fines.

As greater and greater focus is placed on delivering a superior customer experience, IT must ensure the performance of mobile apps, online bill-pay systems, and the quality of contact center interactions. When these systems and tools are compromised, companies run the risk of customer churn and resulting lost revenue. Business reputation is on the line, making mean time to repair (MTTR) an urgent priority.

The Growing Need for OT Observability in Remote Locations

The complexity of energy and utility networks makes the job of IT professionals considerably harder as OT networks become increasingly dispersed. Observability is needed out to these remote locations in order to pinpoint the source of any network and application problems. Such remote locations might include power stations and substations. Substations are often unmanned but are essential to delivering power over the “last mile” to customers and commercial clients. Having visibility into systems at these locations is crucial to ensure that distribution systems and consumer consumption monitoring systems are functioning properly. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and Distributed Network Protocol 3 (DNP3) applications that are sent to the substation are vital parts of communications that enable utilities to monitor power availability, distribution, billing, and so forth.

These communications rely on the network to work properly. Even basic functionality—such as badge-reading services that enable crew members to get into service substations—requires that networks are operating optimally. Consider the widely reported security issues related to potential copper theft at remote locations. This is another concern due to the potential disruption of power to customers, but also due to the physical danger to intruders. This has necessitated video surveillance at substations, which also needs to remain uninterrupted in order to monitor and protect vital facilities. Observability is key to obtaining early warning of emerging issues throughout the OT ecosystem, enabling IT to significantly reduce troubleshooting time.

Observability Is Crucial for the Customer Business Side of Networks and Applications

Obviously, the OT aspect of the network is critical to power generation, transmission, and distribution, because these essential services must work flawlessly 24/7/365. Proactive monitoring is required to ensure quality performance. Being able to track and trend activities is key to avoiding degradation and to getting ahead of problems.

Equally important is the observability of the customer business side of networks and applications. For instance, applications tied to advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), which collects detailed metering and billing information, must be maintained without disruptions to ensure the best customer experience. When problems do crop up, they need to be rectified quickly. Anything involving customer engagement, whether web-based, mobile app services, customer resource management apps, or call center and call communication systems, are all essential services. IT must maintain an exceptional operating environment, which means end-to-end visibility is needed.

Vendor-independent, Packet-Based Network and Application Performance Monitoring

The complexity of today’s modern networks often involves data centers, cloud platforms, colocations, and the internet, creating enormous challenges for IT to gain adequate visibility across the entire infrastructure. Most single-point monitoring solutions are limited to a fraction of this data ecosystem, leaving teams in the dark and unable to pinpoint the source of the issues when problems occur.

What is needed is a vendor-independent, packet-based network, and application performance monitoring solution. NETSCOUT relies on packet data and its own unique technology, Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI), for creating what we call Smart Data, which is derived from the packets throughout the network and application infrastructure. This Smart Data allows IT to analyze response time, latency, throughput, and the quality of audio, video, and business data applications. What sets this solution apart is the ability to see interdependencies all the way through to the user experience.

By relying on packets, NETSCOUT’s vendor-independent approach allows IT to evaluate problems faster and achieve a dramatic reduction in MTTR. As a result, energy and utility IT teams can reduce the impact of slowdowns and outages on power generation, transmission, distribution, and employee productivity. They can also assure the performance of customer-facing services, ensuring the best customer experience. Having the right observability is imperative to keeping the lights on and everything else! 

View the webinar “Observability for Performance and Availability in Energy Utility Networks” to learn more about how NETSCOUT helps address complex, multivendor OT environments managed by energy IT professionals.