Manufacturer Prioritizes Application Uptime for On-time Product Delivery

Customer Profile

This large division of a multi-billion-dollar manufacturing company supplies critical components to enterprise and government customers worldwide. Over 40,000 employees provide design, manufacturing, and services delivery. With offices and manufacturing around the world, this manufacturer depends heavily on its networked applications and services to meet business objectives and maintain communications with employees, partners and customers.

Executives, including IT leaders, drive excellence and empowerment throughout the organization. The CTO office recognized that data center transformation was imperative to support business initiatives. As part of the transformation, they wanted a proactive user-centric application assurance solution that would ensure optimal performance from their critical applications and IT environment and be able to resolve problems quickly.

The Challenge

The division faced multiple concerns, both short and long term, that needed to be addressed and resolved to achieve the data center transformation. Of immediate importance was ongoing issues with a mission-critical manufacturing application used for planning and scheduling materials, resources, and manufacture of their final products. Any delay or down-time with the application could result in delays or missed deliveries impacting revenue and reputation. However, they lacked the visibility necessary to proactively identify degradations in performance and quickly pinpoint the source of the issue.

This customer was also experiencing continual degraded performance of communications applications hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud impacting customers and employees based in 200 regional offices. The data center transformation this manufacturer had undergone over the recent years created a void in their visibility into performance across their hybrid cloud network.

Having used tools from multiple vendors, some of which no longer operated in the new environment, the IT team had a goal of expanding visibility that met the architecture and performance needs of this much more complex, multi-vendor deployment.

The IT team found themselves consumed by responding to problems rather than strategically addressing issues proactively before the users were impacted. The company wanted to continue their practice of out-sourcing specialized services for best-in-class results and more efficient use of internal IT resources, with the latest advances in monitoring technology.

Solution in Action

As a long term NETSCOUT® partner, the IT team was very familiar with the original InfiniStream appliances for monitoring wire traffic throughout their data centers. They chose to update and expand the NETSCOUT solution for proactive monitoring to solve their immediate problems and their digital transformation initiatives. For their data center transformation project, they selected the InfiniStreamNG using the COTS-based models to cost-effectively deploy highly scalable instrumentation that matched storage and performance to the high volume, high-speed network they were implementing today. Adding vSTREAMs gave them a collaboration tool in hybrid cloud configurations and allowed them to monitor the communications and instant messaging apps in Microsoft Azure and be prepared to monitor future cloud-based applications. For their critical remote regional offices, the division deployed nGeniusPULSE to monitor network and application availability and performance over ethernet and Wi-Fi connections.

For the immediate problem with the manufacturing application, they used nGeniusPULSE standard web tests and confirmed that the basic connectivity was good, and the ongoing issues were due to service issues native to the remote location. Pinpointing the root cause so quickly averted a multi-hour outage and helped them resolve the problem in 20 minutes. Further consistent testing exposed more issues including DNS latency which was causing degraded user experience.

Working with NETSCOUT, they selected the nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS) solution that leverages the nGeniusONE platform and a team of experts to provide the end-to-end proactive visibility they needed to accomplish their goals. nVaaS enables hands-free proactive monitoring and alerting. The nVaaS team triages the alerts and reaches out to the division IT team with the facts -based evidence from the NETSCOUT solution as to the root cause of the issue and recommendations for resolution.

The Results

With the packet intelligence from nGeniusONE, complimented by nGeniusPULSE testing from remote sites, and pro-active monitoring by the nVaaS team, IT has restored the manufacturing application to consistent, reliable performance. When issues with it, or any other application in the data center or public cloud, do arise, the Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) is significantly reduced. Time lost in the manufacturing process can mean costly delays in production or missed delivery commitments to customers. Reducing troubleshooting and restoration time to 20 minutes means real savings for this manufacturer.

Additionally, by identifying and resolving the delayed web portal response time at remote regional offices, the end-user experience and productivity has improved.

Companies are making strategic decisions on outsourcing so employees can focus on core competencies and business impacting initiatives. NETSCOUT has responded to this driver with its nVaaS offering. With the nVaaS team performing routine application and network monitoring, issue detection and correlation, the division has increased IT efficiency and effectiveness.

Using the nGeniusONE user-centric application service assurance platform, has freed IT to focus on strategic business issues, knowing that the network is proactively monitored to gather the insights to enable immediate fixes and improve overall service level performance.