We use it every day for triaging of events. We can eliminate whether or not the network was at fault within a matter of minutes. Because the network team always gets blamed for slowness or something not working, so we always have that evidence putting that to bed.

The solution provides the right people in our organization with the right information in a single pane of glass view. We can point it based as a service if we want to or specify user access as to who needs it, then they can grab it when they need to.

A lot of times we can see the issue without going to a PCAP, whether there is an error code in the service monitor drill down. For other apps, we do have to go to a PCAP, but we can identify that. Our team has been pretty well-trained in that as to what to look for.

We do have unified communication (UC) application performance enabled. We don't use it a lot. We haven't had a lot of use cases go to it. We do have a dashboard that runs and looks at our overall MOS scores for our phones. We have seen it in a use case where in previous versions we had a situation analysis alert that pointed to some inappropriately configured QoS mappings on a switchboard through a drill down. So, we have used it to isolate certain problems. However, these days with a lot of calls traversing mobile phones and stuff like that, UC has become a little bit of the norm for some expected QoS mismatches.

We have a direct internet connection (DIA) on most of the sites and nGeniusONE helped us with reviewing bandwidth depletion from the sites. Most of them were utilizing like 30 Mbps, but we were adding 100 Mbps. We went and collected data from all the sites using nGeniusONE, then we initiated a project for refacing the Mbps bandwidth, which gave us business revenue improvements. We reduced most of the sites' bandwidth and a lot of our spending (on unused bandwidth). This solution has saved us more than $50,000 a month and freed up 30 percent of our bandwidth.

It's able to give me real-time data. We were working on a project a couple of days ago where we were able to compare the nGeniusONE data and the packet data. Initially, the network team was using the nGeniusONE tool. However, right now, most application owners and the application team have access to nGeniusONE. They want to see how the application performs under real-time. Therefore, we are definitely moving towards have the application team use it as well. The management is also really happy.

Especially with the pandemic situation, we asked most users to work from home. We set up a lot of SSL VPN clients on the AWS Cloud. We were just using the nGeniusONE to monitor the bandwidth and the packet flow to the data center. Then, users were reporting a lot of issues connecting through the SSL VPN client. So, we did some analysis using nGeniusONE. We tweaked and removed a lot of the bottlenecks, allowing the user to work from home comfortably. We also set it up AWS cloud to give us more back and forth data and users connected through SSL VPN. Based on that, we increased the licensing count on the SSL VPN because we saw a lot of users connecting through one region's VPN. Therefore, nGeniusONE has definitely helped us a lot during this pandemic time.

This solution is good about providing us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. We set up a lot of wireless connections for our R&D users to get real-time data across the globe when they access the data center. nGeniusONE showed us how the traffic is going through the MPLS, and we can move that traffic to the DIA.

Using the nGeniousONE, we found out that most of our sites were not marking the traffic. Therefore, we took the packet capture from nGeniusONE to Cisco and worked with them to fix it.

We use it VoIP, video, and monitoring the contact center application performance. It has helped us with uptime and the user experience.

We did a big shift in how we do some of our internal business. To see what the impact would be, we got a baseline of our day-to-day traffic and performance. Then, as we did a proof of concept of the new solution that we were working on, we could see how much that was going to change our performance and our growth, per user, and that enabled us to ramp up bandwidth and resources as needed for that big change.

We wouldn't have been able to prepare our network in a way that would have kept everything functioning properly, without that information.

We're in the wireless space and it does help us with our deployments, especially when we launch new services. We have a lot better visibility.

The solution is very helpful. We're in the support side of the house, doing operations. It makes our workflow a lot easier, being able to very quickly - in near real-time - trace things for our customers when they report issues. It helps us get to root cause quickly. A lot of the issues that we face are interlocution between different vendors. This helps us capture that data and provide it to both vendors, as well as analyze it, ourselves, against the specs. It has cut our overall troubleshooting time. These vendor interlocution situations have gone from a couple of weeks to a couple of days.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. I would estimate it at about 20 percent, overall.

The biggest benefit is the ability to do low-level packet inspection. When I say packet inspection, I don't mean looking at payload, but just looking at your communication handshakes and the like. It reduces troubleshooting time because you can get a much better view into the communications path between servers, database servers, web servers, and understand what's going on. So the biggest impact is reducing time to recovery when we have a problem. It's the kind of thing such that when something is just flat-out broken, you can usually figure it out, but when you have degraded performance in applications, that's when it can be very valuable.

We are using nGeniusONE to run our bandwidth capacity management reports. In the past, we used to be very reactive, we used to depend a lot on suppliers to tell us which sites are our hot sites, meaning, which have high bandwidth utilization. Now we do this in a much more proactive way and we are moving to a more predictive approach in that aspect, thanks to nGeniusONE.

We started using the product because our customers had some problems with the network. We made changes to the network and made it stable. However, the customer told us there were still some errors. Then the people from the database told us the problem was the network, not the database. The only way to verify it was the database and not the network was by putting a sniffer in it. And that's why we use NETSCOUT.

It definitely provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It's been pretty useful for some of our cases, especially hardware refresh, where it's been a pretty amazing tool.

It has also definitely helped with detection of anomalies. We've been able to identify a handful of issues within our network. It's been pretty useful. As for root cause, there have been more than a few occasions where we've been able to identify issues right away. We have also seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. There have been a number of situations where, if we didn't have this, we would have been scratching our heads trying to figure them out.

In addition, it has cut our overall troubleshooting time. Last year we had quite an outage that went for a couple of weeks. If we had had this solution implemented the way it's working now, I'm pretty sure it would have just taken us days, instead of weeks.

We build application dashboards and performance indexes for locations.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments, e.g., data migration.

The solution helps us get to root cause quickly by using the Media Monitor to help identify QoS mismatches for voice calls on the network.

We use the solution for unified communication application performance. It helps us with uptime and end user experience. We can proactively detect if there are issues and resolve them before they impact the end user.

If an outage happens, the tool helps us to identify the performance of the specific application and enables us to identify the issue. It helps improve our mean time to repair.

nGeniusONE has also been able to reduce outage time. Whenever there is an outage, it's quickly able to identify it and, without pointing fingers, we can prove that it is not the network environment. It helps us understand there is another reason and helps us move towards other areas for troubleshooting and fixing issues. That's a major factor where the tool is helping in applications that have the most business impact. We're able to diagnose and fix issues at the earliest, while avoiding large outage times and the associated business loss.

The solution transforms packet wire data into real-time data that is ready to act on. That's great for our multiple network services because it provides more insight into aggregation areas, and gives a unified view of the applications. From the application point of view, ultimately we need to discover the applications and configure it and then explore the options. This is a difference between network services and application services, but I'm most involved with network services.

It also definitely provides the right people in our organization with the right information in a single-pane-of-glass view. That's 100 percent true. We have different infrastructures from different vendors. If we had just Cisco, for example, we would only need to focus on the different Cisco tools. But with Bluecoat or Symantec, we need to focus on their tools. Because of TCP/IP, we can measure all the packet data in a single dashboard and we can show it in a single, unified view of all different infrastructures.

Another advantage is the increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. Wherever we have the internet streams running across, we can see the entire site; what is happening and what other things are going on. We get more insight from the usual wired or wireless data.

Using it we also get to root cause quickly. We have massive business transactions happening continuously during the Christmas season. We were able to have increased traffic loads. However, the business transactions were also dependent on our vendors. If a vendor was unable to handle that much traffic load, we were able to prove, with the help of nGenius' reporting module, what number of transactions were crossing the network and which ones the vendor rejected.

We have also seen an increase in application uptime. For one or two applications it's 50 to 60 percent better.

And to some extent it has consolidated tools, however not at the application level. Rather, it has done so at the TCP or packet level. The consolidation has definitely saved us money, on the order of 20 to 30 percent.

In addition, when it comes to visibility across IT silos, the solution helps to bridge the gap between the application folks and the network folks. The network folks have always been siloed within the network infrastructure, and the application folks have also been siloed in the different components. NETSCOUT helps to bring every team into the single pane of glass to identify and isolate who is missing data across the applications or the infrastructure.

The solution most definitely provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It allows us to understand changes that we're making in the network, as well as our network's performance day-to-day and hour-to-hour.

We're also able to see customer impact before the customer complains. Often, in a legacy network, we were used to customers calling in to our call center complaining about the service, but now we're actually identifying problems even before the customer notices. 

It helps us get to the root cause quickly, allowing us to drill down into the problem to actually see what service is impacted. It has provided a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. Being able to identify the problem more quickly and having the customizable dashboards make a large difference, making us much quicker than we ever were.

In addition, the solution has absolutely helped us increase our application network uptime. Being able to see the response in near-real-time, we utilize the five-minute increments in the dashboards and the tools frequently. If we're performing our work and we see an impact, we can deal with it much faster than with our old legacy tools, which were sometimes an hour or two in delay.

We have cut back on our troubleshooting, by isolating certain trouble areas. It has brought visibility to what requires replacement in the future.

We had a situation where a client said the network was the problem, because their reports weren't running from an automated server report. After multiple support groups tried to isolate and troubleshoot the situation, the incident came to us. We were able to isolate it with five minute clicks and determine that it was an access issue.

The solution gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It's recording data all the time, so we have the "before" picture and the "after" picture. That's a big thing.

The Dependency Mapping is very helpful. When everything is instrumented correctly, and we can bring up a Dependency Mapping, sometimes it even surprises people in terms of what the applications are talking to and where the single failures might be.

In addition, in the troubleshooting area, we are able to zero in on an issue more quickly and get things working faster. In areas where we have instrumentation, we have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair.

It helps out with firewall issues. Aside from having the logs that are just on the firewall, we're able to get the traffic as it's going in between, throughout our network. It isolates end sources that are having issues, where we don't have any other tools that would be able to go down to an end-user's computer to find out what's going on.

It's catching quite a few things. Most of them really aren't a big deal and we should probably adjust our tolerances for them. A lot of the things are nice to know about but we really don't dig into them because they're not a huge deal.

As far as bigger issues go, it catches those on a weekly basis. That's how often we find something big enough that the only reason we know about it is because of the nGeniusONE. The bigger issues are mostly security-type issues: odd traffic leaving our network or coming into it, that has found its way past a firewall.

When we first got it, we used a lot of it for DDoS attacks to be able to find out where they were coming from, because we were able to actually see the packets and then get all the IPs. That enabled us to block sections of traffic that were constantly hitting us. After that it's server issues, router issues; just about everything.

We get increased visibility from nGenius while conducting an IT deployment. If the deployment has issues then we can always go back, look at the logs, and figure out what may be happening.

A lot of times people blame the network, and since I'm responsible for the network, people call me. Through troubleshooting using the tool, I verify that it's not our issue, and I also use the tool to help figure out what the issue really is.

It helps us get to root cause quickly. For example, troubleshooting an application issue without the tool would mean we wouldn't have the collection of data to go through to figure out what the problem is. Now that we have X number of hours, maybe even days of data, depending on what we're actually watching, we can look at the data. It's possible that somebody's having an application issue and they come to us figure out what the problem is and we can help them solve their issue a little faster.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. It's a little hard to say how much because it depends on what you're troubleshooting, but I would estimate it at 25 percent, or even less, of what it would normally be. And our overall troubleshooting time, in most cases, is down to a day, as opposed to multiple days. Without the data, it's almost impossible to figure out what a problem may have been.

Everybody is using the same tool set. Therefore, we are speaking the same language.

Network faults are easily and quickly identified through dashboards and drill down.

It's a great monitoring tool. At a glance, we can get an idea of what's going on in our network.

Also, while I don't track it personally, I know that time to repair has been reduced and that it has cut our overall troubleshooting time.

It gives us quicker reaction times and more proactive diagnostics, especially in terms of needing to set up an alarm if a threshold was exceeded.

It gives us a deep package inspection. It provides that sort of visibility. It also has the ability to get the data in real-time.

This solution helps us get to root cause quickly, especially as we dive deep capturing packets.  

Before we were pretty weak in network KPIs. That's the area where we have improved as a result of the solution, based on the service.

The solution transforms packet wire data into real-time data that is actionable. It helps us with faster detection of issues and allows us to create alerts.

It also provides the right people in our company with the right information in a single pane of glass view. There is always a place for improvement, but it does so. We have created a special dashboard for different teams so that each team has a relevant dashboard for the system.

In addition, nGeniusONE provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. When we are launching a new node or a new application, it gives us a way to check that traffic has moved from one node to the other and that we still have the same level of traffic and the same success ratios.

It also helps us to get to root cause quickly, for sure, with the drill-down. If we see an issue on a KPI or we have an alert, we drill down to get into the special cases — tracing and that kind of thing — to detect the root cause.

Using nGeniusONE for unified communication application performance for VoIP helps us with uptime and user experience. We can see, for a given call, if it is a one-way or there are gaps.

This solution provide us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment.

When we have any type of outage, and we dig into it, we are able to tell what the root cause is instead of having to go through Wireshark, etc. 

I manage the entire building, so I have the responsibility for extending network capacity if we hit a limitation. It gives us the possibility of increasing the capacity wherever it is required. We have over 55,000 employees across Canada, from the Atlantic to Vancouver, so I use the tool on a daily basis to do my analysis.

It helps us get to root cause quickly. When we have a problem or people are reporting latency on their network, my guys are, of course, checking for the dates, specific times, and IP. We can get all the information that we are looking for, in detail. While my guys are not responsible for finding root cause, the solution is quite helpful in finding it.

In addition, it has cut our overall troubleshooting time for my network guys, when there's a real network problem. It has increased our network uptime as well.

It has provided us with increased visibility, not during deployment, but downstream, once we actually turn up services, whether it's microservices or a VNF.

During outages, and in terms of visibility into VNF and container behavior across the various versions of our cloud, it has helped our organization.

nGenius also helps us get to root cause quickly. Signaling is one example. We have challenges between applications that share the same baby clouds but that utilize storage differently than the network. We don't have that visibility now in some of our deployments. Our new deployments will have that visibility because we're not using copper for a lot of the east-west traffic in the cloud. We're actually moving to fiber so that we have that visibility. The next step will probably vSTREAM.

In addition, I believe it has cut overall troubleshooting times for the OSS and DevOps teams, and it has increased uptime. I'm not in the operations lane, but I know that is something that we have to have.

The solution gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment, depending on what the deployment is. As long as it's still monitoring in places that we're deploying something - for example, if it's in the DMZ, and it's going over a firewall - we have sniffers and tasks with this product deployed. In that case, we should be able to use it.

Another example would be when we're in the process of doing a lot of backups to the cloud. The teams come to us and they want a certain amount of bandwidth and a certain amount of resources, and they constantly ask us whether it's too much or too little, or can they use more overnight or at certain times. I can go back to my NETSCOUT reports and find out whether they're in trouble or actually have more capacity so they can ramp up their operations. It provides a view into that.

When we actually can use the product, we can see a measurable decrease in mean time to know or mean time to repair. It definitely has been something we wouldn't do otherwise, especially for capacity planning. We will get there when we have more proactive alarming and monitoring in place. It can greatly cut overall troubleshooting time once you know how to use it and it's properly and fully implemented.

The solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment.

It also helps us get to root cause quickly. We've had some voice issues, unified communication issues, over the last few months, and it gave insight that the voice team didn't have. We could actually pin it down to the point that we had a bad DSP box.

It has cut our overall troubleshooting time. It's taken the complexity of having to do SPAN sessions from the core and other places, by just going straight to this tool and applying the proper filters and getting the information.

It gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. For example, once we launched VoLTE, we had other tools in the network that we were using for some other use cases, but in terms of MOS scoring and general monitoring of how the VoLTE calls were doing, we were using the Media Monitor.

We're not really using it to proactively capture outages, like Zero-day outages for example, when there is something completely new. But once we detect an outage, we can then use the tool to understand what it was and create an alarm, and that can be used for future similar outages so we can avoid them in the future.

It also helps us get to root cause quickly. We had an Rx Diameter issue at some point in IMS, and without the product it would have taken us more time to be able to troubleshoot and figure out what was happening. With the product, we were able to use Universal Monitor right away to figure out the actual error code and understand the issue from there.

In terms of unified communication, that's the VoLTE modules and the MOS scores. We used it heavily when we launch VoLTE. Currently, we have monitors set up per region so that we can monitor VoLTE. We also have it per event, so when we know something is happening on a big scale and we really need close-up monitoring, we set it up specifically for that area or region or the particular cells, to monitor that particular event.

The solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time and has helped to increase our network uptime.

We have partnered with Netscout over many years with various solutions - TruView, nGeniusOne, Infinistream, XG, etc.

With the focus on customer-defined applications and triggers we have been able to provide important information to clients regarding their application performance.

It has played an integral part in providing valuable information in a critical arena.

The ability to use pre-defined applications and configure client-specific applications allows for a comprehensive solution that enables all teams within the IT organization.

As the network team, we get engaged when somebody having a problem with an application, and they have run into so many walls that they've come to us. The network team typically manages this from top to bottom, so we use it to troubleshoot.

This solution helps us get to the root cause. Most recently, we had a third-party vendor who was experiencing trouble. They said it was our problem, trying to determine if something was wrong with the SSL connection. They spent some time looking at it, like days or weeks even looking at this.  When they came to us, and said “Can you get a packet capture? Can you tell us what is going on?” We were able to identify it in about a minute.

We use this solution for unified communication application performance. It help us with uptime and eases our experience. There are user experiences that we've been able to get to the root cause of very quickly using their tools. We have found QoS mismatch and different anomalies in the QoS configuration. We have used this to troubleshoot and find issues, where we could explain exactly why a client was behaving the way it was. It might not be necessarily security, but technical.

It benefits us by finding situations in our networks that we don't know exist.

It helps us get to the root cause quickly. It helps us find massive error codes, then we drill down on that error code, knowing that is the source of our problem.

We were able to find working hardware, which we were not able to do it with any other tools.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments. E.g., if we have devices which have overloaded or links which have saturated, then this tool tells us exactly what is going on with that link or device. Very few tools do it at this level for things like DDoS.

The solution help you get to root cause quickly.

With the Vprobes, we quickly identified issues on the application servers, which we normally couldn't, where it usually would be a full circle round between our NOC and server people.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments.

We have seen a small decrease (10 to 20 percent) in our overall troubleshooting time.

nGeniusONE provides us with increased visibility while conducting a deployment. I'm not on the IT side, I'm on the carrier side, but it provides that increased visibility for us.

From the standpoint of VoLTE and related things, it's providing visibility into the network and how it operates. It has also improved our ability to troubleshoot end-customer issues.

In a network deployment, it provides us with increased visibility.

From the service assurance perspective, in SMS in particular, they use it very heavily to proactively try to hit issues. There are a lot of times where NETSCOUT will catch something spinning up the SA organization and then, in turn, spinning up the operations organization to go catch and kill it; or it comes over to network development. So it's used fairly extensively.

We use it on the cloud side more from a reactive perspective and it's certainly helped us catch and kill a couple of issues that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. 

It helps us get to root cause quickly. We had an OpenStack Cinder issue, a storage-type issue, and we chased our tails on that for quite some time until we managed to get the data over to a NETSCOUT probe. Then we were able to very rapidly figure out what the heck was going on.

When we can get the data into the tool, we absolutely see a decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair, and similarly for overall troubleshooting time. With that Cinder issue, we spun our wheels for almost two weeks before we managed to get the data over to the tool and, once we did, we solved it fast. So it can be days or weeks of saved time.

In terms of application uptime, it's deployed and leveraged for almost all the applications in our organization: VoLTE, SMS, MMS, etc. So as heavily as the service assurance groups and operations use it, I'd say that they consider it pretty essential at this point.

It's easy to detect unwanted traffic with all the detection tools available.

It has helped with the operations teams, who have been able to collect information and troubleshoot with the application. So, it has been a benefit for the lower tier support.

It has helped identify issues more quickly.

For some of the applications we've managed to drill down and get more granular data, because it provides such small granularity — a microsecond or a millisecond of data — that you can actually get finer response-time detail out of it. That helps a lot.

It has improved some of the visibility of some of the unified communications with the ability to drill down into finer time increments in the packet data. We are able to search through those and get those Wireshark-types of views, with some extra flexibility and visibility on packet data or wire data.

The product hasn't helped the way our organization functions.

Going forward, we will be using this solution for unified communication application performance: voice, video and data.