Visibility in Virtual Environments Accelerates Problem Resolution for Manufacturer

Customer Profile

This global company designs, manufactures, and sells analytical technologies to thousands of customers in critical pharmaceutical, health sciences, and other scientific industries. With over $2B annual revenue and more than 5000 employees operating in dozens of countries, they have a complex mix of manufacturing, sales, and distribution facilities.

As a current NETSCOUT® customer, IT successfully manages their “traditional” network of centralized datacenters and more than 10 distributed manufacturing facilities as the company delivers products in over 100 countries globally.

The Challenge

Each of the company’s distributed worldwide facilities is critical to the success of product design and delivery, so employees at each location need to have comparable access and application performance to do their jobs and achieve corporate goals and objectives. However, users in Europe consistently complained of slowdowns with heavily-used applications, specifically Citrix, Oracle, and Microsoft Office365, which negatively impacted their productivity and satisfaction with IT.

The company already uses NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances for monitoring wire-data in their centralized data center. In this case, the applications experiencing slowdowns were in a recently virtualized server farm and IT lacked visibility into the east/west traffic in those virtualized application servers, thus impeding their ability to identify the cause of the slowdowns.

In addition to this specific issue, IT knew that their new CIO’s initiative of moving services to the cloud would mean they needed to maintain visibility into applications that were moved from their private data centers to the public cloud.

Solution in Action

Because the company was already using nGeniusONE, they understood the value and benefits of real-time, continuous wire traffic monitoring. IT knew they had issues where they needed access to the packets to resolve. To extend wire-traffic monitoring to the virtualized environment and close the visibility gap, they elected to expand their NETSCOUT deployment with vSCOUTs and vSTREAM virtual appliances in their VMWare ESX environment, generating Adaptive Session Intelligence™ (ASI) smart data for smart analytics with the corporate nGeniusONE platform. The IT organization is gaining much needed visibility into east/west traffic for analysis of application performance and are troubleshooting from dashboard views all the way through to packets to resolve issues in the virtual environment when necessary.

With the packet data visibility, the Network team can troubleshoot issues in the virtualized environment. Immediately after vSCOUT™ and vSTREAM were deployed, IT saw the server response time issue and recognized that some of the servers supporting Europe were timing out. They quickly identified that a server was down, causing the application slowdown users were experiencing.

The Results

Having visibility to the smart date from packets in the virtualized application servers has enabled IT to prove if an issue is due to an application or server or some other issue. This has reduced the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) many issues, particularly as they have effectively removed incidents of time-consuming finger pointing among vendors and in war rooms. The end user experience for employees in Europe has improved, as IT has visibility and can perform in-depth analysis when there is an application slowdown.

With the visibility they have gained from the vSTREAMS, the company is now much more prepared and confident of success as they implement their CIO’s initiative of moving apps to the cloud. Both the Network and Apps teams have gained insights into the east/west traffic in the virtualized environments. The increased collaboration has helped them identify existing and potential issues and best practices to continue to improve the experience for their employees around the world.