PropertyRoom.com Turns to NETSCOUT for Smart Data Intelligence to Perform Applications Migration to AWS

Customer Profile

PropertyRoom.com is an online auction marketplace that works with more than 3,000 law enforcement agencies and municipalities nationwide to help auction seized, stolen, abandoned, and surplus goods. 

The Challenge

 PropertyRoom.com was created in 1999 to assist law enforcement agencies, who by statute must auction seized, found, and unclaimed personal property at public auction. Instead of conducting the auctions in a parking lot, which was the common practice, shifting to an online service was more convenient for the agencies and bidders alike. As the company has grown, it became necessary to move to a hybrid application hosting environment to assure service delivery to a rapidly expanding national customer base. The AWS application hosting environment was selected for PropertyRoom.com’s web access, application services tier and database tier.

After selecting AWS as the Cloud Service Provider of choice, PropertyRoom.com wanted complete visibility into On-Prem and AWS cloud environment to resolve any issue they might encounter during workload migration. Following migration to the hybrid cloud on AWS, DevOps engineering professionals detected that loads on the company’s servers were higher than expected, leading to performance and security concerns. The challenge they faced was in pinpointing the exact root-cause of the problem. 

Solution in Action

To meet its AWS monitoring and visibility needs, PropertyRoom.com selected to use NETSCOUT across both on-premises and AWS. Prior to starting the migration to AWS, PropertyRoom.com utilized nGeniusOne for baselining of on-prem application performance and understanding all the application dependencies in preparation for the migration to AWS.

In the next stage, Virtual nGeniusONE was deployed together with vSTREAM™ from the AWS marketplace in Property Room’s AWS region and Availability zone. Amazon VPC traffic mirroring was then enabled, which provided mirror sessions from the key Windows Servers to be monitored, to the vSTREAM network interfaces as targets. Following implementation of the NETSCOUT solution, the DevOps engineering team used the Discover My Network dashboard to quickly uncover the cause of the exceptionally high loads on the servers when compared with pre migration statistics. IT was able to determine that one of the servers was much busier than the other. By drilling down into the busy server, the team was able to see the MSSQL database transactions that were responsible for the heavier than expected load.

NETSCOUT was also able to detect unclassified traffic on an unusual port. By examining this application protocol, DevOps engineering drilled down to the packets using nGeniusONE to reveal this traffic was being caused by a legacy application. This application should have been removed from the latest image of the application server and failing to do so resulted in the server attempting to communicate with an obsolete application. This created the high load on the server, which placed undue burden on the network, while also exposing a potential security vulnerability involving the open port on the server. 

The Results

By leveraging NETSCOUT’s Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) to create smart data from PropertyRoom.com’s packet traffic , DevOps engineering was able to quickly identify the root-cause of the high load and remove the legacy application from the image. This also eliminated the possibility that subsequent image clones would perpetuate the problem. This end to end visibility in Hybrid cloud environment on AWS gave full confidence for PropertyRoom.com to continue their cloud migration to AWS.

The NETSCOUT monitoring solution allows the DevOps engineering team to proactively monitor and troubleshoot application performance  before, during and after migrating applications to AWS, rapidly identify the root cause of server and application problems, thus reducing Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR). As a result, PropertyRoom.com has been able reduce costs and ensure a quality end-user experience through nGeniusONE solution validating migration success. 

“NETSCOUT has enabled PropertyRoom. com to ensure peak performance of our services before, during and after application migration to AWS,” concluded Kevin Felichko, Chief Technology Officer, at PropertyRoom. com. “The ability of this solution to uncover the issues with our server so quickly during migration to AWS and improve MTTR by as much as 80% is a true testament to how powerful it is in today’s increasingly complex hybrid cloud deployments. NETSCOUT is a game-changer for enterprises migrating to cloud.”