NETSCOUT
The Change Maker

Handling complex Unified Communication (UC) environments over the converged network is a daunting task for even the most experienced IT teams today. A part of this problem can be attributed to the lack of strong performance management visibility. Organizations need to get an overarching view of the performance characteristics of all infrastructure and application components associated with service delivery than looking at individual elements in isolation. NETSCOUT [NASDAQ: NTCT] a market leader in real-time service assurance offers a unique platform powered by ASI technology to solve application, UC and network performance management problems that impact organizations today.

NETSCOUT's nGeniusONE unified performance management platform unifies application and network performance management to provide a top-down view into any IP-based business services, including voice, video, and data. The platform combines real-time situational awareness, historical analysis, and multi-layered analytics capabilities. This unified perspective enables IT organizations to more effectively manage the health and availability of diverse application environments, improving the network and application teams’ ability to proactively identify and triage performance issues, assess the impact and quickly identify the root cause of problems.

The company was co-founded by Anil Singhal in 1984, under whose leadership NETSCOUT has grown substantially during the past three decades. Serving as the CEO and a director on the company’s board since inception, the steadfast entrepreneur is credited with numerous innovations in the field of network traffic monitoring and analysis that have helped NETSCOUT gain several industry accolades.

"The nGeniusONE platform is powered by the patent pending adaptive session intelligence™ (asi) 2.0 technology"

Service Assurance Platform—nGeniusONE

The nGeniusONE platform supports diverse voice, video and data environments with a service-focused approach to performance management. This enables IT teams to manage diverse services including web-based applications, remote desktop application such as Citrix, public and private cloud environments, UC services such as Voice over IP and specialized environments such as payment processing or financial trading with one unified tool. Custom application definitions and logical groupings of user, server, application, and network data enable IT teams to create meaningful analysis views.

Presenting a completely new architecture, the nGeniusONE platform unites the traditional approaches of application and network performance management in a single unified tool. For application performance management needs, the platform provides specific insights into key performance indicators such as application responsiveness, new and active client-server session metrics, service requests and application error codes. For network performance management needs, the nGeniusONE platform provides hop-by-hop transaction latency measurements, details about traffic volume and link utilization, information about quality of service (QoS) levels, and information about application usage across the network. By bringing this information together in a series of multi-dimensional views, the nGeniusONE platform is able to provide deep insights which enable IT users to proactively identify problems faster and manage the health and availability of the service delivery environment.

The nGeniusONE platform is powered by the patent-pending Adaptive Session Intelligence™ (ASI) 2.0 technology. This powerful deep packet inspection data mining engine runs on nGenius Intelligent Data Sources, generating metadata based upon actual session traffic in real-time as the packets cross the wire. This metadata is then used by the nGeniusONE platform to visualize application and network performance characteristics, enabling IT teams to quickly identify and resolve application and server performance problems. Common performance analysis use cases include understanding the root cause of application performance issues, server performance issues, and understanding or mitigating end-user impact from service degradations.

Additional benefits of the ASI metrics include verifying that servers are properly load balanced, comparing performance among different application tiers, or visualizing interdependencies of services with other services or enabling protocols. ASI metadata is organized into three categories – Adaptive Common Data Model (A-CDM), Adaptive Session Records (ASR), and Adaptive Session Trace (AST). The highest level of metadata, A-CDM, is collected from nGenius InfiniStream appliances and stored on the nGeniusONE Server at set intervals throughout the day.

Advocating for the importance of reliable, high-quality voice and video, NETSCOUT employs a best-in-class approach to measuring the media quality through its Mean Opinion Score (MOS) technology. Enterprises are constantly reaping visible benefits from MOS by assessing the quality of speech and other metrics and taking actionable steps to mitigate the problem.

The Consolidated Approach

Organizations are realizing the dire need to put a proactive strategy in place to detect network anomalies and avoid a potential outage before it has a chance to escalate. For an undulating UC&C network, administrators can take a quick look at the interactive nGeniusONE dashboard and identify a malfunctioning system from the map-like interface of the entire UC&C infrastructure. The system also has the ability to send alerts and alarms when any abnormalities are sighted, for further investigation. Nothing escapes NETSCOUT’s range of vision, promising optimal levels of service assurance throughout the service timeline, from implementation to delivery of the communication infrastructure.

NETSCOUT has designed its nGeniusONE platform in such a way that it facilitates easy on-ramping of the platform into the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) lifecycle of a UC&C transformation project. Enterprises that inject nGeniusONE into their Service Design—Strategy and Budget phase—have a competitive edge over the others, as the process by itself ensures that monitoring can be established at every phase of the project. Finally, during the operation and improvement phases, customers can use nGeniusONE to zero in on problems and solve them promptly, while the UC&C and the much broader IT environment adapt and grow to the changing demands of business.

At the end of the day, NETSCOUT is more than just IT service assurance; it enables CIOs to make a significant contribution to business assurance as a whole. The consolidated contribution that NETSCOUT offers to UC&C networks for leading enterprises that record some of the busiest traffic levels is a true testament to its proficiency in service assurance, cybersecurity, and performance optimization.

Organizations around the globe find that using a single service-oriented performance management platform from NETSCOUT is the most effective in triaging service performance issues. Underpinning the firm’s prowess, a testimonial from a client sums it all. "With NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, our telecommunications company has derived some core benefits. We get a consistent, holistic and comprehensive view of our entire network service delivery IT infrastructure. We’ve also been able to initiate quicker problem resolution, reducing MTTK substantially. Lastly, we have also increased our service uptime and end-user productivity.”

Over the last three decades, NETSCOUT has evolved from a software consulting business to a service assurance solutions provider. Today, with over one million product installations, hundreds of industry awards, and recognized as a leader by the market analyst community, NETSCOUT remains the persistent leader who is delivering constant and ubiquitous visibility in the connected world.