Automotive Financial Services Organization Protects Business Revenue with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This financial services organization operates globally to provide direct banking, financing, leasing, automotive, insurance, fleet management, and other services to customers of a particular automotive company. Thousands of employees in more than 50 offices around the world work to support millions of customers as they finance, lease, or insure their motor vehicles.

The Challenge

This organization has been a long-time NETSCOUT® customer, using the solution primarily for troubleshooting and reporting. The enhanced visibility has allowed them to assure uptime, resolve problems quickly, and stay aligned to the business. As the company grew, a new datacenter was needed to meet modern expanding needs. NetOps was responsible for ensuring high quality end user experience and needed a solution to restore end-to-end visibility within the new datacenter design. Virtualized environments increased the difficulty in ensuring visibility at the access level.

As part of the launch of the new datacenter, security policies were tightened up, and a new policy was put in place requiring all access to production environments to go through one of two isolated DMZ’s. This created a big challenge for IT.

Customers and employees of this organization rely on critical applications and business services for important functions to drive business revenue, including Citrix XenApp published desktops, Oracle, and an in-house dealer financing application published over Citrix.

Assuring the performance of the applications hosted in this new datacenter was of critical importance to NetOps. Although customers and offices are located around the world, all financial transactions came back to this centralized location for processing. NetOps at this organization partners very closely with the business, so maintaining maximum uptime for this crucial business service was key.

Solution in Action

A long-time customer of NETSCOUT, the NetOps team understood the power of Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI). They knew that smart data could restore their end-to-end visibility within the new datacenter. The nGeniusONE service assurance platform was deployed with a Global Manager Server to provide end-to-end visibility for critical business applications. InfiniStreamNG appliances were deployed in the new datacenter to capture packet data and convert it to smart data for proactive detection and troubleshooting, while nGenius Packet Flow Switches were deployed to distribute packet data from the connection layer to the ISNG appliances, expanding visibility across the datacenter environment.

Thanks to the power of Smart Data and ASI, NetOps was able to restore their visibility end-to-end into the performance of application transactions, allowing them to identify if a performance issue was with the application or the underlying Citrix infrastructure. Oracle database issues could be diagnosed quickly and easily, ensuring cross team collaboration and accurate reporting to the business.

The Results

The nGenius solution has proven invaluable to this financial services organization’s IT team. Since implementing this powerful solution, IT has been able to proactively identify and isolate business critical application issues quickly, reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and speeding resolution of customer and dealer affecting service degradations and outages. By proactively avoiding unnecessary downtime, resolving issues before they can impact many employees or customers, the solutions enable IT to protect the business and increase uptime for critical revenue generating applications.

Thanks to the power of nGeniusONE, NetOps can now trace the path of a transaction end to end and see the impact of latency or network congestion as the communication hands off from the Citrix front end to the application, to the database. This allows them to quickly diagnose whether a problem is with Citrix, the network, the application, or the database, and escalate promptly to the correct team, reducing MTTR.

For this organization, the NETSCOUT story was all about end-to-end visibility and ensuring IT stayed aligned with the business. Before the nGenius solutions were deployed, they struggled to view or report on critical business services. With nGeniusONE, end-to-end visibility was expanded to cover the new data center, and custom reporting ensures a tight alignment with the business owners.