Improving Financial Services Technology Performance With Service Edge Visibility

Customer Profile

This financial services leader successfully processes millions of business transactions every day, which has made the company a household name across the globe.

This company is a long-time NETSCOUT customer, years ago standardizing on nGeniusONE as their service assurance platform of choice. The company had widely deployed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources and nGenius Packet Flow Switches (PFS) appliances to provide smart visibility across their network, with additional service assurance operations expertise provided by their contracted NETSCOUT Premium Support Services engineering resources.

The Challenge

The company found itself balancing commitments to expand corporate operations with efforts to manage pandemic-related business service disruptions. As a result, a team was established, whose mission included improving network operations reliability.

As this new team worked to resolve emerging service performance and application-related issues as part of their mission, they frequently referred to recommended-practices guidance provided by their NETSCOUT PSS Engineer. In these collaborative troubleshooting efforts, the PSS Engineer regularly discussed how adding smart visibility in a segmented environment was a NETSCOUT-recommended best practice. This area had been established to secure primary data center operations and by adding visibility to these segments, they would succeed in closing blind spots that had surfaced across expanding network domains (i.e., service edges), including load balancers, gateways, and other critical network elements. Additionally, this area was serving as a hub for multiple services and incredible visibility around business-critical applications, where downtime meant lost revenue.

The company had also made a related commitment to update these network environments to include deployment of next-generation F5 load balancers.

The company entered into related discussions with NETSCOUT regarding how best to improve service edge visibility in a manner that capitalized on existing network investments and already-established monitoring and troubleshooting workflows.

Solution in Action

Based on the conversations with NETSCOUT Engineers, Operations leadership committed to deploying additional ISNG smart data sources in these environments to introduce visibility across service edges, including:

• Between multiple, interdependent environments
• Newly deployed F5 firewalls
• Traffic traversing between Web servers, application servers, to database servers
• External gateways

These ISNG appliances generated smart data in real-time from the network packets traversing across these service edges, which is consumed by nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution to provide performance analytics for at-a-glance views across the data center and site operations environments. The company’s investment also enables the Operations team to take advantage of visibility provided by already-deployed ISNG appliances at other sites to promote their real-time service assurance capabilities.

The Operations team provided expanded access to granular NETSCOUT smart data in this environment by using PFS Mode functionality, which enabled ISNG appliances to watch many different links, simultaneously.

The Results

Moving ahead with an expanded NETSCOUT technology rollout offered the following benefits to company operations:

• Visibility enhancements allowed Network Operations to meet their targets for reliable business application performance and reduced downtime instances
• Lower operating expenses, with a single-vendor approach to service assurance, smart visibility, and packet broker technology
• Fewer vendor tools to manage and support across global data center operations