State IT Teams Improve Service in Managing Increased Network and Application Demands with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This Information Technology (IT) team manages a large-scale network and applications environment supporting service delivery for the entire state, including more than 40 state and local agencies.

The State’s 200-member IT team incorporates Network Operations, Network Services, Hosted Application, and Voice subject matter experts. Those collective IT resources support the network, application, virtual, and voice performance technology needs for both financial and human services government departments, including the Juvenile Justice System, the State Comptroller, and Health & Human services agency.

Business Challenge

This State’s network operations backbone is delivered using a primary data center and nearby disaster recovery (DR) configuration, with the Network Operations team based in the data center.

Every year, the Network Operations team sees “more users, doing more things, with more applications,” which translates to an associated annual 30 percent increase in overall traffic volume. Given the crucial nature of the human services, financial, and government-level work delivered by state-level and local agencies to citizens, the State Legislature recognizes that the underlying network helping to deliver those services must operate without performance disruptions.

The Network Operations team is increasingly challenged to answer Help Desk calls related to troubleshooting specific network and application performance issues that cannot be addressed by in-place third-party solutions. Such requests frequently require leveraging days of wire traffic for packet-level forensic analysis.

In addition, with the expanse of the respective agency functions and the geographic locations being served by the IT organization, the Network Operations team sees growing requests for certain network troubleshooting services to be coordinated by local IT resources directly employed by respective agencies.

NETSCOUT Solution

Based on superior service assurance capabilities to support their modernized network infrastructure, the IT team chose NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG appliances with 10 Gigabit monitoring support.

The next-generation InfiniStreamNG appliances help support the network backbone infrastructure for the state’s IT deployment. The InfiniSteamNG appliances are configured in the IT organization’s primary data center and disaster recovery facilities, supporting enhanced network and application performance analytic capabilities provided by the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform in production.

In addressing the increased requests for network troubleshooting tools for use by the Network Operations staff and remote agency technicians, the IT team also selected the NETSCOUT OptiView XG Network Analysis tablet, which allows users to connect, analyze, and troubleshoot locations across the network to isolate the root cause of infrastructure-related problems.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

The Network Operations team configured the InfiniStreamNG appliances to monitor 10G uplinks at the data center and DR facility locations in a “Service Provider” fashion. In supporting 10 Gigabit network requirements, the InfiniStreamNG appliances deliver the performance and scaling capabilities needed to analyze network traffic generated by thousands of users employing a variety of agency-specific and commercial business applications.

The NETSCOUT solution enhances Network Operations productivity by enabling the team to quickly and innovatively respond to network- or application-level incident response requests or agency-specific performance issues. For example, when troubleshooting an agency-specific issue with nGeniusONE, Network Operations can leverage unique “community views” to visualize network and application performance status particular to that group for rapid, focused resolution.

From a proactive network monitoring vantage point, nGeniusONE-generated network latency service alerts enable the Network Operations team to avoid network performance issues that would impede important state and local agency business operations.

In equipping Network Operations with a solution for providing Tier 2 & Tier 3 Help Desk support services, the InfiniStreamNG appliance with ASI+ technology supports nGeniusONE’s extended forensic analysis by providing more “back-in-time history” data to be stored for longer periods for post-event troubleshooting. In citing the benefits of one NETSCOUT technology differentiator, the Network Operations team identified the InfiniStreamNG’s ability to support expandable storage for easier future expansion.

The NETSCOUT OptiView XG Network Analysis tablet serves as the wireless companion to nGeniusONE for full WLAN lifecycle management and troubleshooting network infrastructure, and the Network Operations team uses this solution to reduce the time to uncover issues at local offices, including the Health and Human Services agency facilities.

Business Value

In a time where State IT teams are tasked with providing increasingly complex performance management services with finite resources, this long-time NETSCOUT customer is leveraging next-generation nGenius technology to technically improve network performance and enhance functional collaboration between centralized Network Operations, Network Services, Hosted Application, and Help Desk teams, as well as agency-level technicians staffed at remote locations.

In the near term, the InfiniStreamNG appliance brings more horsepower to the network and improves the backbone technology performance required to support spikes in users, bandwidth demand, and applications across state and local agencies. In the longer term, the IT organization is positioned to realize future return on investment, as the InfiniSteamNG appliances offer capacity required to store additional performance, such as VoIP.

Empowering local technicians with NETSCOUT OptiView XG network tablet technology enables core network troubleshooting to be conducted more quickly at the regional level to better-serve that agency’s administrators and customers.