Visibility Helps Government Agency Achieve Success with Co-Lo Migration

Customer Profile

This government agency provides a centralized information technology (IT) service to support several other bureaus, departments, and divisions. They deliver network, applications, and wide area network (WAN) connectivity for these agencies, their employees, and constituents. 

Like so many agencies offering similar services, the IT team understands and appreciates the importance of network and application performance management in delivering high-quality user experience with their government services and applications. To meet their quality goals, the network engineering and operations teams have been long-time users of NETSCOUT^® nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution for visibility into the performance of their network and applications. 

The Challenge

Many government agencies today are migrating to cloud resources to gain cost benefits and operational efficiencies, and this agency is no different. The agency’s IT staff is involved in migrating their private data centers to Equinix Co-locations. 

For years, the agency has depended on their nGeniusONE solution with InfiniStreamNG appliances to monitor, analyze, trend, and report on performance of the network and the applications used by their supporting agencies. This has enabled them to proactively alert on developing issues, troubleshoot problems, and plan for upgrades and changes throughout their private data center to ensure quality of experience for the agencies’ employees and citizens. 

The IT staff required this same level of monitoring capability in the Equinix Co-los to continue this quality delivery of services. To avoid a gap in visibility, the network engineering team resourced their local NETSCOUT sales team to evaluate the planned migration and create an implementation design to ensure detailed network and application performance analysis would be available for their strategic service assurance activities. 

The IT staff was using detailed information from their existing NETSCOUT deployment in making migration decisions to the Co-lo. For their new equipment design, metrics required included network analysis of the ingress and egress traffic across the Internet and WAN links of the Co-locations, trended data on traffic volumes, and performance analysis of application traffic for business services, such as Microsoft Office 365 (O365) and voice / collaboration services, as well as agency-specific applications and services. 

Solution in Action

Due to the size of the user community and the volume of traffic they generate, the agency anticipated needing to support an upsize in their network links to 10GB, 40GB, and 100GB as necessary. This meant they needed nGenius Packet Flow Switches to support these interface speeds, as well. The agency is implementing nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) software for certified PFS 5100 models in the Equinix Co‑Los to access traffic data from the network and switches to distribute to downstream security tools and NETSCOUT monitoring appliances for performance assurance. This will give them the necessary visibility at the WAN Network Edge they need to avoid bottlenecks causing degradations and improve capacity planning and budgeting exercises in the future.

The addition of nGeniusONE Dedicated Global Manager software is ensuring that they will be able to gain a single pane of glass view into all their monitoring ISNG and vSTREAM appliances, regardless of where they are located, for global analysis, views, and reports on all services worldwide. For the new VMware virtualized network in the Equinix Co-los, they are deploying vSTREAM virtual appliances in the ESXi hypervisor environment for the Cloud Service Edge visibility. This will enable continuous real-time analysis to assure quality performance of their services. 

The agency’s network engineering and operations team has built a series of nGeniusONE dashboards, workflows, and reports to analyze and view the network traffic utilization, application performance, and trended information they require to deliver services to all their affiliated bureaus, departments, and agencies, which were swiftly updated with the new data from the vSTREAMs in the Co-los. Ultimately, this is providing continuity in performance analysis and quality delivery of services to their end-users. 

The Results

This agency’s IT organization well-understood the value of nGeniusONE network and application performance visibility based on years of experience in their private data center and without hesitation, ensured the planned migration to Equinix Co-los would have the same level of detailed, real-time, and historical analysis available when live traffic traversed those locations. Leveraging existing investments already made in the nGeniusONE solution, this agency has filled the visibility gaps that would naturally emerge in the new Co-los with the nGenius PFS technology to pass packet traffic from the new network to downstream tools, including new vSTREAM virtual appliances for performance monitoring in the VMware environment. 

Configuration in nGeniusONE was quickly executed to incorporate the new deployment in the Equinix Co-los. Implementation is quick and manageable, as the organization is well-trained and experienced using the solution, so there is no gap in performance monitoring analysis during this migration. The team has shown how to achieve success with seamless migrations from private data centers to Co-los using network and application performance management visibility before, during, and after transitions are complete.