NETSCOUT Helps Insurer Cut Through Complexity of Digital Transformation

Customer Profile

The U.S. company has grown into a financial and insurance services business leader, with millions of clients and billions of dollars in annual revenue.

The company assures high-quality service delivery to their clients by employing tens of thousands of well-trained subject matter experts (SMEs) and agents across numerous business hubs, data centers, contact centers, regional offices, and home-based locations.

The company has come to understand that their ability to expand market reach and retain customers is made easier when they deliver high-quality customer experiences on the Voice and Web platforms used by SMEs and agents.

The Challenge

As the company’s information technology (IT) team began addressing company digital transformation projects, there was a growing sense that their long-time toolsets were not be well-suited to take on these important initiatives, which included:

• Transitioning applications to an off-site co-location (co-lo) facility to ease data center processing loads, a project which was stalled because legacy monitoring tools left them unable to answer questions like “Where are the applications?” and “Where are the servers and what do they talk to?”
• Upgrading to 40G infrastructure in the core to enhance service performance across the business
• Rolling out a new cloud platform to better support business service access for home-based users

Alongside those next-generation projects, there remained current-day challenges eluding IT resolution, including:

• Reliable monitoring of wireless networks in their multi-floor corporate facilities
• Improving efficiency of a legacy back-in-time troubleshooting processes

IT leaders also wanted to further improve IT collaboration and hoped reducing the number of in-use vendor toolsets would assist in meeting that goal. With many of their legacy toolsets due for a refresh around the same timeframe as these collective challenges faced them, IT began thinking there must be a better way.

Solution in Action

Following a rigorous evaluation process, the company selected NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution to provide the visibility and analysis necessary for both their current migration needs and long-term network and performance management requirements. The company is meeting business-critical IT challenges by implementing an integrated NETSCOUT smart data solution that provides the single-pane dashboard views they need for real-time monitoring of their application, network, and Unified Communications (UC) services.

The IT team now enjoys visibility at the network link level needed for monitoring end-to-end service delivery, with NETSCOUT’s software-based InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) packet capture and nGenius packet flow switch approach supporting their move to 40G network speeds, while also providing flexibility and efficiency in terms of how probes and packet brokers are instrumented across their enterprise environment. With ISNG deployed at the company’s network aggregation points, the NETSCOUT solution is transforming the company’s network traffic into smart data, with nGeniusONE using that metadata to improve IT views into how business services are delivered and performing.

The IT team is leveraging nGeniusONE Service Dependency views providing them functionality not otherwise available in competitive alternatives. These views were essential in helping them understand all service dependencies involved in an individual application’s performance, and they factored those elements in transition planning to ensure migration success.

With enterprise user performance such an intrinsic part of running their business, IT is improving service delivered to wireless network users and remote SMEs using cloud-based services by implementing nGeniusPULSE for business service delivery monitoring and analysis. With nGeniusPULSE, remote testing is coordinated centrally and conducted locally, with nGeniusPULSE nPoints transmitting analysis to a centralized server operating at the company’s data center. In addition to extending visibility into the company’s wireless and cloud-based services, nGeniusPULSE synthetic testing is used by IT to provide early warning into potential performance degradations, as well as reporting focused on monitoring performance quality of services migrating to digital platforms. The IT team also benefits by nGeniusPULSE’s ability to extend the service-oriented approach of nGeniusONE to infrastructure monitoring. When an issue is identified by nGeniusONE and isolated as a potential infrastructure problem, IT can drill-down directly from the nGeniusONE console to the underlying and specific infrastructure issue in question within nGeniusPULSE.

The team has also implemented the nGenius Collector for integrating NetFlow data into the analysis. As it does to packet data, nGeniusONE applies ASI technology to NetFlow for seamless, single-pane-of-glass views, regardless of the data source being used. The Network Operations and Security teams have superior network performance capabilities over their legacy SNMP approach, including information on user experience, traffic volumes, application server response times, server throughputs, aggregate error counts, and error codes specific to application servers and domains.

The Results

By gaining a common view of digital services across the company’s enterprise and technical borders, the IT team is advancing key digital transformation initiatives, while making good on their goals for cross-team collaboration, reduced toolsets, and increased troubleshooting and mean-time-to-repair efficiencies. IT quickly saw how valuable these NETSCOUT capabilities would be with the successful transition of applications from their data center to the new co-lo facility based on thoughtful, informed evidence from nGeniusONE.

In addition, the company is meeting cost containment guidelines and reducing digital transformation complexity by standardizing on an integrated NETSCOUT platform, which was viewed as the far-preferable alternative to taking on a time-consuming technology refresh involving multiple vendors.