Multi-national Oil and Gas Company Relies on NETSCOUT for Application Service Performance

Customer Profile

This century-old, multinational oil and gas company is a major Fortune 500 company with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. With thousands of employees working around the globe, this company is one of the largest integrated refiners, marketers of petroleum products, and chemical manufacturers in the world, producing essential commodities that include fuels, lubricants, and specialty chemical products. The complex design of multiple data centers, countless interconnected manufacturing & research facilities makes their enterprise network a critical part of the company’s day-to-day operation and business success.

Business Challenge

Like most enterprise corporations, the IT organization in this oil and gas company was under significant pressure to do more with reduced budget. At the same time, the company recognized the vital role the IT organization must play in helping to improve the business and deliver business projects on time. To accomplish this, the chief information officer (CIO) and IT identified several-dozen key corporate applications that were deemed instrumental for delivering value to the business. Some of these applications were manufacturing, tax, and international finance services used globally across the company. Many were custom applications, web-based services, and/or relied on SAP and Citrix services for operation.

In order to ensure these key application services were available around the clock and around the world, IT needed greater visibility into their virtualized private data centers that hosted them. Any delays or outages in these critical services would be harmful to various business units. The company’s existing application-focused tools simply lacked flexibility, typically supporting only the app it was focused on and requiring other purchases for each additional application. Further, they were functionally limited, unable to provide the holistic insights into the overall application services and interdependencies needed to deliver useable, actionable information in a timely manner to the IT team.

NETSCOUT Solution

To mitigate its application performance and service assurance issues, the oil and gas company turned to long-time partner, NETSCOUT, whose solutions were already being utilized across the organization’s private network. vSCOUT software-based instrumentation was selected by the application operations group and deployed across the company’s virtualized environment on front-end, middleware, database and application servers, and in their Web, Citrix, and SAP servers. The vSCOUT software complements existing Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI)-based InfiniStream® hardware and software instrumentation to provide the same level of visibility within virtualized infrastructures.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

The more than 100 vSCOUT’s strategically implemented on critically important servers across the company’s virtualized environment, was a cost-effective extension of the existing nGeniusONE® platform and InfiniStream appliances already in use by the IT organization. The IT team gained invaluable visibility into the wire traffic, allowing for rich analysis of application performance. nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform supported more than 1,000 protocols and applications, enabling the IT team to monitor and analyze utilization, responsiveness, hosts, and conversations associated with the key business applications, as well as the underlying supporting infrastructure and protocols. In particular, nGeniusONE’s Service Dependency maps revealed interdependencies, enabling IT to solve problems far more rapidly. Further, the sophisticated analysis, like Citrix monitoring in nGeniusONE, delivered in-depth views of Citrix services, protocols and errors for swift diagnosis of issues impacting Citrixbased services.

The NETSCOUT solution empowered a crossfunctional approach to achieving application service assurance, allowing different IT silos to work together seamlessly.

Business Value

The NETSCOUT solution has delivered significant benefits for this multi-national oil and gas company.

The visibility and analysis made possible by NETSCOUT enabled the IT team to protect the company’s core business activities. The IT team now benefits from a complete, holistic view of their application delivery environment, with added visibility into the virtualized servers hosting their key business applications. As a result, the application operations team is now able to effectively troubleshoot issues impacting key application services. IT achieved lower mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) when diagnosing application slowdowns through in-depth monitoring, including Web, Citrix, and SAP.

The visibility provided by the NETSCOUT solution has given the IT team much greater confidence in its private cloud virtualized service delivery, improved collaboration between application operations and network operations and has earned NETSCOUT status as a truly trusted advisor and respected partner.