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Case Study: NETSCOUT’ TruView Helps Ensure Network and Application
Performance Across County Tipperary in Ireland
At a Glance:
Customer:
Challenge:
County Tipperary
County Tipperary is one of 32 historical counties in Ireland
and home to more than 158,000 residents. Until recently,
the county had been administered by two separate
authorities: the North Tipperary County Council and South
Tipperary County Council. A 2012 government decision to
merge the two councils has resulted in the need to create a
single, unified IT infrastructure for the county’s services
and public-facing websites. When completed in June 2014,
the network will include a mix of internal applications,
public-facing websites and portals for services such as
housing, water, roads, environment, planning and other key
local government functions. The county’s IT staff needs
visibility into the performance of the network and
applications across the entire county to quickly identify and
resolve the source of problems.
Industry:
Government
Location:
Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland
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Result:
The €1.8 million IT consolidation project includes the
creation of a primary data center and disaster recovery site
in the town of Nenagh connecting to 57 remote county
offices and sites over a variety of connections (point-topoint, VPN, private DSL, MPLS, etc.). While the network is
still being built out, County Tipperary’s IT staff has used
NETSCOUT TruView to identify potential issues that could
have resulted in perceived performance problems for end
users. TruView has already uncovered operational
performance issues like balky Exchange servers, while
helping to geographically isolate (and rule out) causes for
issues like slow user log-ins. That has helped the Tipperary
IT Infrastructure team, which is located in the northern part
of the county, provide users in the south with the level of
service they expect despite the distance separating them.
Product:
NETSCOUT TruView
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“
“With TruView you can get a high-level overview of what’s going on with a particular site or a particular application very quickly. It’s
very easy to interpret. We can see which applications are having or causing problems. With our previous solution, it took much longer.
And, of course, with TruView you can drill down into the data when you need to take a closer look.”
Customer
”
County Tipperary is one of 32 historical counties in Ireland and home to more than 158,000 residents. Until recently the county had been administered by two
separate authorities: the North Tipperary County Council and South Tipperary County Council. In 2012, the Irish government moved forward with a somewhat
controversial plan to combine the two county councils into a single entity, a decision that will take full effect in June 2014.
One of the more complex tasks involved in the merger is the creation of a single, unified IT infrastructure for the county’s services and public-facing websites.
The €1.8 million IT consolidation project includes the creation of a primary data center in the town of Nenagh and disaster recovery site connecting to 57
remote county offices and sites over a variety of connections (point-to-point, VPN, private DSL, MPLS, etc.).
When completed, the network will include a mix of internal applications, public-facing websites and portals for services such as housing, water, roads,
environment, planning and other key local government functions. In addition to standard business applications for communications, productivity, CRM and
financial management, the network will also host some bandwidth intensive GIS and mapping applications. It will also support remote access and a variety of
mobile services and applications.
Challenges
Creating a single unified network across all of County Tipperary is a major undertaking. All of the merged authority’s back-end infrastructure will be located in
the North of the county. As a result, all WAN services from the Southern part of the county are being relocated and re-terminated at the Nenagh head end.
Major sites in the south of the county will send traffic out through a switch core, up the point to point link to be dropped off in the primary data center core.
About 800 users will be connecting to services hosted in the data center, of which approximately 450 will be from the southern part of the county.
Dermot Tobin, Information Systems Project leader for the Network Services and Infrastructure integration effort, noted that the technical complexity of merging
existing systems, applications and data was just one of his major concerns. He and his team are especially conscious of the fact that users from the Southern
part of the county are sensitive to performance issues in light of the division of labor and responsibility for the unified network. Being able to remotely
diagnose and solve network and application problems is a priority.
“We need a tool that can give us a complete picture of what is happening with applications, servers and the network across the entire county,” said Tobin.
“Right now, we’re still building the network. But in the medium term, it’s important for us to be able to isolate the source of performance issues so we can get
application problems on the desk of the applications team and network problems to the network team so they can address them quickly.”
Solution
Tobin and his team chose the NETSCOUT TruView appliance to provide the application and network performance monitoring they need. TruView leverages
key data sets such as stream-to-disk packet storage, application response time, transactional decode, IPFIX (NetFlow), and SNMP to present analytics
through a single reporting interface. As TruView processes analytics from these data sets, it time correlates the results providing cross-functional IT teams
such as network engineering, application, and server teams with a new found ability to work more collaboratively and solve problems fast. County Tipperary
deployed TruView directly in its data center core.
“With TruView you can get a high-level overview of what’s going on with a particular site or a particular application very quickly. It’s very easy to interpret. We
can see which applications are having or causing problems. With our previous solution, it took much longer. And, of course, with TruView you can drill down
into the data when you need to take a closer look.”
Tobin has been a user of NETSCOUT products for more than 12 years. County Tipperary even had one of the earliest OptiView portable network monitoring
devices which was extensively used across the network. So when it came time to choose a performance monitoring solution, Tobin knew NETSCOUT could
deliver.
“We had no identified budget for a TruView appliance this year, but we could clearly see the benefits we could realise from deploying the solution. We
managed to identify savings and re-prioritise some other projects within our budget in order to fund purchase of the TruView” said Tobin. “We chose the
TruView because it offered better value than the other performance monitoring solutions we saw.”
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Results
According to Tobin, before deploying the TruView, performance monitoring was fairly manual. “We’d used and were very familiar with NetFlow. With TruView,
we have a much better view of application performance, particularly from the user perspective.”
Tobin cited the example of an application response time issue with Exchange. TruView helped to isolate the particular server that was the root of the problem.
As the launch of County Tipperary’s unified network approaches, TruView has helped Tobin and his team find “bits and pieces” of things that might have
impacted application performance had they gone undetected.
Another recent example of practical use was an issue in which slow user logins were being reported from the southern end of the network. “Using the
TruView, within minutes we eliminated the point-to-point link, server side performance and end user response times and firmly diagnosed the issue to be local
to the southern end of the network. This is exactly the type of scenario we knew the TruView could help us with. Prior to this it would have required an
exhaustive search to figure out what exactly or where exactly the issue was.”
As the launch of the new, unified network gets nearer Tobin sees TruView becoming even more useful. “We’re looking forward to seeing how much more it
can do. I don’t think we’ve taken full advantage of it yet.”
© 2017 NETSCOUT. Rev: 01/06/2017 10:36 am
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