NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

We currently use NetScout as a way of monitoring multiple links between branch offices within our company. The main purpose has been for packet tracing. We have multiple platforms; Microsoft, Unix, Mainframe which we must ensure traffic is not only flowing correctly but within a reasonable timeframe. NetScout has given us this with a graphical interface that can display traffic statics in a way that is easy to read as well as allowing an engineer to dig into the packets even deeper.

We primarily use nGeniusONE for troubleshooting of issues across the network. By entering the source/destination we can get the metadata and packet level data to have good visibility into what is happening. Additionally, dashboards can be set up for quick views into the network and utilizing baselines, find out if anything is out of the norm. Packet level data can be exported and sent for analysis if necessary as well.

It is used globally at over a thousand locations for network traffic analysis, including NetFlow for every site and datacenter packet capturing. The analysis includes bandwidth capacity management, Top Talkers/Top application analysis, VoIP call analysis, and SharePoint traffic. It is used by the Telecom department and recently started to be leveraged by the applications departments. We are also leveraging the service desk to use it for initial incident triage.

NetScout nGeniusONE has been used across multiple departments in my company, especially for operation teams who manage and operate the infrastructures including networks and data centers. It is mainly used to monitor the service performance and support root cause analysis for network performance degradation and outages.

From implementation it has been used to diagnose and find problems. We have been working sometime to operationalize the system into monitoring solution for all IT organizations within the company. With nG1 we have been able to baseline our applications which provides us the ability to do alerting and reporting to the appropriate group to look further into problems.