Government Agency Enhances Application and Network Performance by Standardizing on NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This agency supports multiple government organizations, providing assistance with planning activities. 

For years, their information technology (IT) team has assured business service performance by using NETSCOUT technology to provide visibility into the agency’s wide area network (WAN) and applications environment. 

The IT team has also benefitted from enhanced return on investment (ROI) from NETSCOUT, using the deployed nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform (nGeniusONE) and InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliance solution to solve agency-unique customer application and infrastructure performance issues, as well as exporting smart data for use by another vendor’s network modeling tool. 

The Challenge

The network domain monitored by NETSCOUT was just one of several managed by IT operations. For networks not using NETSCOUT to provide visibility and real-time monitoring, the IT team relied on a mix of vendor point tools, each offering varying levels of visibility. One network and application performance vendor also provided simulation tools, which required a significant onsite consulting services effort to operate at the agency. That solution was expensive to manage and, over time, offering a diminished ROI.

With agency leadership necessarily moving to consolidate IT budgets to accommodate currentday expense containment targets, there were high-profile evaluation activities focused on validating the overall value being delivered by respective vendor tools and services.

For the agency, the end goal was standardizing on a single-vendor solution that brought expanded visibility for improved monitoring of government assets, as well as integration with other deployed solutions to enhance their utilization and ROI.

Solution in Action

The agency met, and in some cases exceeded, their project goals by standardizing on a single-vendor NETSCOUT solution across their networks. The IT team deployed the following NETSCOUT solutions to bring enhanced visibility and monitoring:

• Expanded nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, with nGeniusONE standby appliance, standalone server, dedicated Global Manager, and virtual nGeniusONE standby server bringing enhanced redundancy to IT operations.
• Additional InfiniStreamNG appliances were deployed to enhance network visibility, with these smart data sources supplementing already-deployed ISNG appliances monitoring and expanding IT views into the performance of Internet links and concentration points in the agency’s data center.
• vSTREAM virtual appliances were installed in the VMware server network to improve visibility into internal eastwest traffic in the data center’s virtualized environment

In meeting an overarching project goal for enhanced integration, the IT team used the NETSCOUT Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) Stream Express module to export smart data generated by ISNG and vSTREAM appliances to enhance performance of the following agency technology investments:

• ServiceNow workflow solution, including ServiceNow alarms
• Splunk data platform, including dashboarding capabilities
• Amazon Web Services

Beyond deploying technology that helped the agency meet functionality and cost containment goals, IT leadership maintained operational continuity throughout vendor transitions by relying on the NETSCOUT Onsite Service Engineer (OSE) who had for years been a go-to contact to resolve network and application performance issues in a manner that satisfied the agency senior leadership, who had been made aware of these problems. As a result of these efforts, the IT team used the NETSCOUT solution to resolve the following challenges:

• Troubleshooting circuit failover issues
• Identifying outdated services
• Extending agency visibility into new site deployments
• Identifying network bandwidth consumption trends

The Results

While this agency reduced their financial commitment to IT operations with this project, the IT team actually enhanced their network visibility, application monitoring, third-party integration capabilities, and system redundancy.

Beyond receiving extended ROI from their NETSCOUT investment, the agency has increased organizational access to the benefits offered by smart visibility and nGenius service assurance, with both the IT Operations and Executive teams taking advantage of real-time service dashboard and high-level reporting to improve their views into service performance.