ServiceAssuranceSolutionForDummies PDF

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Service Assurance
NETSCOUT Special Edition
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition

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ISBN: 9781119135555 (pbk); ISBN: 9781119135562 (ebk)
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Publishers Acknowledgments
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Project Editor: Carrie A. Johnson
Acquisitions Editor: Steve Hayes
Editorial Manager: Rev Mengle
Business Development Representative:
Sue Blessing
Key Contributors: Jim McNeil,

Michael Segal, Matt Kelleher,
Tracy Steele
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
About This Book......................................................................... 2
Foolish Assumptions.................................................................. 2
Icons Used in This Book............................................................. 2
Beyond the Book......................................................................... 3
Where to Go from Here.............................................................. 3
Chapter 1: Whats the Big Deal about

ServiceAssurance?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Key Technology Trends............................................................. 5
Service Assurance in the Enterprise........................................ 7
Service Assurance for Service Providers................................. 8
Chapter 2: Introducing the nGeniusONE Service

Assurance Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Service Assurance Solution Overview.................................... 12
Adaptive Service Intelligence(ASI).............................. 13
Service Triage.................................................................. 13
nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform
architecture................................................................. 14
Additional Capabilities of nGeniusONE................................. 16
Intelligent Data Sources................................................. 17
Traffic Discovery............................................................ 17
Advanced search............................................................ 17
Session and packet analysis.......................................... 19
Addressing IT Operational Challenges
with nGeniusONE.................................................................. 20
Chapter 3: Implementing nGeniusONE

inYourEnvironment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Understanding nGeniusONE Services.................................... 23
Using Dashboards, Spaces, and the Service
Hierarchy Tree...................................................................... 26
Network Domain Dashboard......................................... 27
Application Services Dashboard.................................. 27
Unified Communications Dashboard........................... 28
Spaces.............................................................................. 30
Service Hierarchy Tree.................................................. 30
iv

Managing Service Dependencies............................................ 31
Configuring Alerts and Monitors............................................ 32
Chapter 4: Exploring Service Assurance Using

nGeniusONE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
An Enterprise Use Case............................................................ 35
Service Provider Use Case....................................................... 37
Chapter 5: Ten Benefits of nGeniusONE

ServiceAssurance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Service Delivery Management................................................. 39
Service Triage and Root CauseAnalysis................................ 40
Unified Communications Performance Management........... 40
Capacity Planning andOptimization...................................... 41
User Experience Monitoring.................................................... 41
Network Monitoring Fabric..................................................... 42
Data Center Modernization..................................................... 42
Branch Office Visibility............................................................ 43
IT Operational Excellence........................................................ 43
Network Visualization andAwareness................................... 44
Introduction
ake up to the fact that #ThereIsNoOff, and you need a

new solution to manage this reality. Unless youre still
using a rotary phone, your companys network is the water
supply to your business. While the strategic importance of
delivering IPbased services is constantly increasing, enterprises and service providers are being pressured to find ways
to deliver these services faster, with higher quality, while
reducing operating cost.
Unfortunately, the traditional bottomup triage methodology
based on multivendor silospecific Network Performance
Management (NPM), Application Performance Management
(APM), and log data analytics tools is ineffective and
doesnt offer a holistic service-level triage capabilities to IT
organizations.
Because the bottomup triage methodology relies on data
thats spread across multiple, disparate tools, it conceals
the problem until the end, when the phone is ringing and
your service is degraded! This compartmentalized oldschool
model of service delivery monitoring inhibits the ability to
triage service degradations effectively, significantly increases
meantimetoresolution (MTTR), and extends the time spent
in the war room pointing fingers. The overall result of relying
on the bottomup triage methodology is drastically increased
service unavailability, reduced quality of enduser experience,
and loss in productivity.
Enterprises and service providers need a comprehensive
service assurance solution that enables endtoend visibility across service delivery environments to gain realtime,
actionable intelligence for exceptional service performance.
Continuous realtime monitoring is a must! To be truly effective, the solution needs to offer proactive service triage
capabilities to reduce MTTR by identifying the root cause of
service degradations to prevent outages.
About This Book

Digital services are the lifeblood of the connected world that
drives a global economy worth 77 trillion dollars. Your daily
activities, such as shopping, banking, entertainment, transportation, healthcare, and others all depend on the uninterrupted
and secure operation of these services. Service Assurance
refers to all aspects related to the protection of the services
in the connected world in which you live. Because every service action and transaction is conducted over the network,
its only natural to rely on trafficbased insight for service
assurance. This book describes best practices for proactively
collecting, organizing, analyzing, and visualizing traffic data
in realtime to deliver endtoend service assurance for enterprises and service providers.
Foolish Assumptions
Its been said that most assumptions have outlived their
uselessness, but Ill assume a few things nonetheless! First, I
assume you have a working knowledge of network operations
management and networking technologies. This book is for
anyone and everyone involved in network operations not
just system or network administrators!
Next, I assume you work in an enterprise or service provider
organization with stringent servicelevel agreements (SLAs)
and uptime requirements for maintaining network and application availability 24/7/365. Finally, I assume that youre a
business or technical decision maker, such as a CIO or IT
manager, evaluating service assurance solutions for your
organization. If thats the case, this is the book for you!
Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, I occasionally use special icons to call
attention to important information. Heres what you can expect:
This icon points out information that screams Remember me
for centuries! Okay, maybe not for that long, but you should
definitely commit it to your nonvolatile memory or your
noggin. Now try getting that song out of your head!
Introduction
You wont find a map of the human genome here, but if you
seek to attain the seventh level of NERDvana, perk up! This
icon explains the jargon beneath the jargon!
Thank you for reading; I hope you enjoy the book; please take
care of your writers! Seriously, this icon points out helpful
suggestions and useful nuggets of information.
This icon points out the stuff your mother warned you about.
Okay, probably not. But you should take heed nonetheless
you might just save yourself some time and frustration!
Beyond the Book

Although this book is chock-full of information, theres only
so much I can cover in 48 short pages! So, at the end of this
book, if you find yourself thinking gosh, this was an amazing
book, where can I learn more? just go to www.netscout.com.
You can also discover more specific information about service
assurance and NETSCOUTs nGeniusONE platform at these
links:
www.netscout.com/education/overview/
resources
www.netscout.com/solution/enterprise
www.netscout.com/solution/serviceprovider
Where to Go from Here

If you dont know where youre going, any chapter will get
you there but Chapter1 might be a good place to start!
However, if you see a particular topic that piques your interest in the table of contents, feel free to jump ahead to that
chapter. Each chapter is individually wrapped (but not packaged for individual sale) and written to stand on its own,
so you can start reading anywhere and skip around to your
hearts content! Read this book in any order that suits you
(though I dont recommend upside down or backwards).
Chapter1
Whats the Big Deal about

Service Assurance?
In This Chapter
Keeping up with current technology trends
Understanding service assurance in the enterprise
Recognizing keys to success for service providers
his chapter describes the challenges that enterprises

and service providers are facing by using traditional
bottomup service assurance technologies, and the extent to
which service assurance impacts the bottom line for modern
organizations.
Key Technology Trends

Information technology and communications networks are
critical in our modern connected world. Businesses and
organizations in every industry and of every size rely on
their information systems and networks in every aspect of
their operations to conduct business, serve their customers,
and accomplish their missions. Theres no off switch in the
connected world, where everyone not only expects but
demands access to their networks, systems, applications,
and data at any time, from anywhere, and on any device.
Organizations need highly reliable IT infrastructures to ensure
that business operations are never interrupted. Service inter
ruptions, outages, and failures can cripple or kill a business.

According to a 2015 study by Forrester Consulting, the
average cost of a service brownout is $19,162 per hour, and
for a downtime event, it is $29,162 per hour. Half of respon
dents in the study reported that more than 90 percent of their
IT issues take more than 24 hours to resolve (see Figure11),
resulting in potential losses of up to $11 million a year.
Figure 1-1:IT issue resolution is costly.
Several important trends have emerged to enable advanced

capabilities but they also add complexity. These trends
include the following:
Public, private, and hybrid clouds: Cloud technolo
gies enable business agility and operational efficiency.
By hosting their systems, applications, and data in the
cloud, organizations can benefit from economies of scale
and fully realize the benefits of CapEx and OpEx efficien
cies. However, cloud technologies also increase the
strategic importance of connectivity and can create addi
tional complexity and abstraction in the network.
Virtualization and consolidation: Data center modern
ization initiatives often include projects to consolidate
underutilized hardware resources by using virtualiza
tion software. Virtualization and consolidation of server,
network, and storage resources, as well as desktop and
application virtualization, can all lead to significant
savings in CapEx and OpEx, but they can also increase
dependencies throughout the enterprise computing
environment.
Chapter1: Whats the Big Deal about Service Assurance?
Mobility: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies have

become ubiquitous in the enterprise as organizations
enjoy higher individual productivity when they allow
their employees to use personal devices and applications
for workrelated purposes. But BYOD isnt without its own
unique challenges that include security, privacy, accessi
bility, and support.
Internet of Things: The Internet of Things (IOT), or the
rise of smart devices that connect themselves to the
Internet, is here. This next generation Internet applica
tion, also known as M2M (machinetomachine), leads
to a point in time when the majority of Internet traffic is
generated by things rather than by humanoperated
devices. After all, microprocessors can now be found in
all sorts of things from automobiles, credit cards,
passports, elevators, and thermostats. This transforma
tion is unleashing a new wave of requirements for predic
tive analytics and IT automation.
Service Assurance
in the Enterprise
Modern enterprise systems and networks are fragile. The role
of IT has become that of guardian of the connected world,
and its a critical role. Proactive, realtime monitoring is a
must to ensure ongoing, optimal service (see Figure12).
Service assurance is enabled with tools that instrument
complex environments and measure normal and abnormal
events in large enterprises. A service assurance platform
that collects and analyzes trafficlevel data can alert IT when
problems occur. It can also evaluate the overall health of
services, and identify potential problems early, before they
impact multiple users or the entire enterprise.
Service triage is the practice of identifying the root cause of
problems in complex multitier physical and virtual service
delivery environments. Meantimetoknowledge (MTTK) is
the time required to complete service triage and can consume
as much as 90 percent of the overall time to repair a problem.
You learn more about service triage in Chapter2.
Figure 1-2:Service assurance across the entire network.
Service Assurance for

Service Providers
Mobile, cable, and wireline operators face many difficult
challenges in delivering IPbased services to their endusers.
All operators who have to deal with the complexity of deliver
ing services over modern IP networks face the following key
success factors:
Reduce churn and improve top line revenue growth
Deliver differentiated, highly valued services to existing
and new customers
Seamlessly introduce innovative user devices and appli
ances that enhance a personalized user experience
Deliver exceptional user experience and high levels of
QoE (Quality of Experience) and QoS (Quality of Service)
Chapter1: Whats the Big Deal about Service Assurance?
Optimize operational processes to take advantage of

organizational efficiencies and cost reduction made
possible by the migration to allIP networks
The proliferation of IPbased services has transformed the
concept of service assurance and delivery management for
service providers. As more and more services are delivered
over IP networks, service assurance strategies are changing
from a reactive, networkelement alarm focus, to a proactive
approach that centers on quality of service and endtoend
performance. This proactive approach has considerable ben
efits because it better aligns with the workflows that opera
tors need to assure an exceptional user experience. At the
same time, this approach enables service providers to more
rapidly monetize investments in their existing IP multiservice
networks.
Customer satisfaction has many dimensions, but improving
the quality and reliability of a service has a direct impact
on the user experience and the customers propensity to
churn. Service delivery problems over IP networks, whether
they involve voice, data, video, or an integrated combination
of these applications, can occur in mobile, fixed, and cable
Multiple System Operator (MSO) networks at multiple points
in the service delivery architecture (see Figure13). IP ser
vices consist of a complex interaction of application, session,
and transport layer protocols that operate in concert across
multiple hops and network elements from the data center,
to the core, and out to the access portions of the network.
Understanding this complex interaction of IP protocols and all
of the moving parts required to deliver a service is challeng
ing for even the most skilled technical teams.
The service delivery supply chain encompasses multiple pro
cesses, resources, and network domains both within an oper
ators span of control as well as external to it (for example,
thirdparty content). Successfully assuring the user experi
ence in todays IP multiservice networks requires a compre
hensive solution that addresses performance challenges seen
at various locations within the network and at peering points
with other networks that together form the endtoend service
delivery supply chain.
10
Figure 1-3:Service provider and MSO networks are complex.
NETSCOUTs nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform

empowers service provider teams with the assurance capa
bilities to confidently manage the delivery of services, and
more importantly, user experience, in modern IP networks.
You learn more about nGeniusONE in Chapter2.
Chapter2
Introducing the
nGeniusONE Service
Assurance Platform
In This Chapter
Looking at the service assurance solution
Exploring additional capabilities in nGeniusONE
Solving operational challenges proactively
our organization needs a solution that has holistic visibility and global reach a crystal ball that can monitor
your service delivery infrastructure from a high level but also
has deepdive troubleshooting capabilities. Although not quite
a crystal ball, NETSCOUTs nGeniusONE platform, powered by
patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology, is a
service assurance architecture that addresses this complexity
in a comprehensive, costeffective way. In this chapter, you
discover how the nGeniusONE platform and ASI technology
can help assure service delivery and provide efficient service triage. You also learn how nGeniusONE provides these
capabilities with pervasive endtoend visibility across physical, virtual, and hybrid service delivery environments, and
addresses IT operational challenges.
12
Service Assurance Solution

Overview
In highly scalable enterprise and service provider infrastructures, identifying the root cause of service degradation,
referred to as meantime-toknowledge (MTTK), can consume
as much as 90 percent of the overall meantime-torepair
(MTTR). NETSCOUTs nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution
offers efficient service triage which can substantially reduce
MTTK based on pervasive endtoend visibility across physical, virtual, and hybrid service delivery environments (see
Figure21). The triage is performed proactively by detecting
service degradations in realtime, and is based on a single
cohesive and consistent set of metadata. The metadata is
generated by patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI)
technology running in both virtual environments and nGenius
Intelligent Data Sources. This metadata provides meaningful
and contextual views.
Figure 2-1:nGeniusONEs ASI technology helps reduce MTTK.
nGeniusONEs pervasive and scalable data collection is established by instrumenting strategic access points across the
service delivery infrastructure, using physical and virtual
appliances. The traffic-flow data collection and aggregation
is passive and nonintrusive, and can scale to collect any
required volume of data.
Chapter2: Introducing the nGeniusOne Platform
13
The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform aggregates, correlates, and contextually analyzes the metadata gathered from
data sources in physical and virtual environments. It then
creates realtime holistic views of service performance, establishes performance baselines, and facilitates serviceoriented
troubleshooting workflows.
Adaptive Service Intelligence

(ASI)
Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) is nGeniusONEs secret
sauce patented technology that uses a rich trafficflow
data Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine to generate highly
scalable metadata. The metadata enables a comprehensive,
realtime and historic view of service, network, application,
and server performance. It generates metadata based on
actual session traffic in realtime as the traffic crosses physical or virtual links. The generated metadata provides important metrics such as application traffic volumes, application
server response times, and server throughputs. Aggregate
error counts, error codes specific to application servers and
domains, and other data related to network and application
performance are also provided. ASI technology is the foundation of a highly scalable service delivery monitoring architecture that seamlessly collects, normalizes, correlates, and
contextually analyzes data for all business services.
Service Triage
Identification of failed service delivery components is the
number one concern in performance management. Service
triage is the process of identifying and fixing problems that
impair application performance. nGeniusONE provides tools
and workflows that put power in your Network operators
hands to triage and investigate issues at high levels and, when
necessary, drill down all the way to the individual session and
traffic levels.
Interconnected tools including the Dashboard, Service
Dependency mapping, the Alert Browser, and Service
14

Monitors provide numerous ways to identify and investigate
anomalies using flexible, intuitive interfaces:
Which services are affected
When the issue occurred
Which sites are affected
Which applications are affected
What servers are impacted
What user groups are experiencing the problem
nGeniusONE Service Assurance

platform architecture
The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform streamlines
service delivery assurance and management activities by
providing a converged solution for network and application
performance management, delivering holistic visibility across
complex, distributed environments. The visibility delivered
by the nGeniusONE platform spans virtually any application
or application tier, thereby enabling effective, endtoend performance and availability management for diverse business
services (see Figure22).
Figure 2-2:The nGeniusONE platform.
15
By using a single cohesive, consistent set of analytics and

views, based on one common database of metadata, the
nGeniusONE platform improves communication and collaboration across the different functional IT groups. The
platform also accelerates the evolution of IT organizations to
more proactive service delivery management models where
service issues and degradation can be detected before large
numbers of users are impacted, boosting service availability
and avoiding loss in revenue, customer satisfaction, or worker
productivity.
nGeniusONE streamlines service delivery management by providing the following key analysis layers:
Service Dashboard provides realtime, ataglance,
holistic status visibility of all business services and their
network and application components. The dashboard
also delivers alarms and analyticsbased, intelligent early
warnings to enable the IT organization to proactively and
predictively protect service ability and performance.
Service Dependency visualizes the current state of the
environment by automatic discovery and mapping of
clientserver relationships.
Performance analysis enables comprehensive, multi
dimensional analysis of application and network performance of all dependencies. This analysis layer includes
predefined service monitors for common enterprise
services, a customizable service monitor to support
userdefined service environments, and a Traffic Monitor
for network performance management.
Session Analysis enables sessionlevel analysis with hop
byhop transaction analysis.
DeepDive Traffic Analysis enables expert traffic and
protocollevel analysis and forensic evidence collection
(see Figure23).
This approach dramatically reduces meantimetorepair
(MTTR) and conserves IT time and resources by enabling the
right expert to investigate the right service component at the
right stage in the resolution chain.
16
Figure 2-3:nGeniusONE topdown serviceoriented workflows.
The nGeniusONE platform provides pervasive continuous

visibility into the service delivery environment and offers proactive service triage. nGeniusONE unique capabilities come
from the following architectural principles and technologies:
Traffic flow data
Scalable traffic flow access
Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology
Additional Capabilities
ofnGeniusONE
In addition to delivering core service assurance and management capabilities, nGeniusONE includes additional capabilities, such as nGenius Intelligent Data Sources, network
discovery and mapping, advanced search, and session and
traffic analysis.
17
Intelligent Data Sources

nGenius Intelligent Data Sources combine realtime, actionable intelligence with pervasive, trafficbased visibility of all
application and service traffic that flows across your IP network for proactive service assurance. nGenius Intelligent Data
Sources help you
Exploit the richness of traffic flow data to provide granular visibility into all data, voice, and video traffic flowing
across global networks
Gain scalable, high capacity data collection and analysis
capabilities that address a broad range of monitoring and
visibility requirements
Get deep, realtime, and historical servicelevel insights
Watch over systems, services, and vulnerabilities
Traffic Discovery
The Traffic Discovery feature finds and identifies applications
that are being monitored on your network segments. Using
traffic monitoring tools, nGeniusONE can discover unknown
protocols (see Figure 24). From Global Settings, you can then
label and mark them for monitoring in the configuration database. These protocols include
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP (User
Datagram Protocol), and IP (Internet Protocol)
applications
Applications discovered based on port numbers
Undefined or inactive protocols in the nGeniusONE
database
Advanced search
The Search and Discover tool, located prominently at the
header level in all nGeniusONE modules, globally queries
a host of objects with the ability to discover all possible
associations for searched context. For example, if a clients
address is searched, Search and Discover also looks for the
nGeniusONE server, which applications are talking to this
18
Traffic Discovery
Figure 2-4:The Discovered Applications feature within Link Monitor shows

the top 10 unknown applications.
client, and which location is seeing this client by querying

all ASI tables. Based on all discovered objects, these associations are displayed, along with a total count (first row data
only). Search data are ranked by either total transactions or
throughput.
The feature also supports drilldowns to related service monitors. Search and Discover supports queries for
Applications
Messages
Server and client addresses and communities
InfiniStream appliance interfaces
Quality of Service (QoS)
Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN)
19
CompID
CellID
Location keys (such as sites, access point name, handsets, cell sites, and others)
Application services
Network groups
Hosts
Session and packet analysis

Session Analysis provides a correlated view of flows selected
for drilldown from the table or charts in Service Monitors.
All flows related to the selection within the specified time
range are retrieved and displayed. Multiple session tabs
may be launched from any Summary tab, and multiple Packet
Analysis (Decode) tabs can be launched from any Session tab.
The Session Analysis feature displays information using three
panes:
Session Overview: Summary of criteria for originally
selected flows; use this pane to select a session for analysis in the other panes.
Session Trace: Ladder diagram depicting correlated
flows with response times for the selection made in the
Session Overview pane. Figure25 shows an example of
an LDAP session trace.
Session Summary: This pane contains one or more
tables summarizing characteristics of the entities associated with the session and flows comprising the session.
A small set of performance metrics is included.
In nGeniusONE, packet analysis can be used to perform deep
dive, protocollevel analysis and forensic evidence collection,
using either realtime data captures or historical data mining. If
you know the specific interfaces and time duration you want to
decode, you can perform packet analysis using the Data Mining
module. You can also decode data traces created by historical
protocol decode or realtime data capture immediately.
20
Figure 2-5:This Session Analysis ladder diagram shows an Authentication

Method error.
Data Mining is also available when using the drilldown feature

included with Service Monitors and Session Analysis.
You can view archived trace files using the Trace Archive
module. The Trace Archive is a repository that you can keep
on an nGeniusONE server and/or nGenius InfiniStream appliance. This repository allows you to save data traces and recall
them at a point in the future when you want to perform traffic
level forensic analysis on saved data.
Addressing IT Operational
Challenges with nGeniusONE
Todays IT operations largely rely on multiple functional
teams using silospecific tools each focused on assuring the
performance of a specific application, application tier, or
network component. The delivery of an exceptional user
experience is dependent on the ability of all IT operational
teams to work together to effectively collaborate across team
boundaries to optimize overall service performance and
troubleshoot issues. A compartmentalized model is outdated
and complicates the management of service performance and
availability, as well as capacity planning, across the different
application and network tiers.
While usage of specificpoint tools provides the individual IT
teams with deep visibility into their respective components or
silos, it lacks service delivery context, and often leads to the
21
use of conflicting performance metrics. Separate tools inhibit

the ability to correlate events across system components and
impede the detection of emerging service issues. Additionally,
this leads to inefficient workflows with time-consuming hand
offs where teams focus on Mean Time to Innocence.
In response to a service issue, IT organizations largely rely on
an inefficient, iterative process of component health verification and exclusion until the root cause is reached. The lack
of unified visibility impedes the adoption of a structured,
topdown approach to problem resolution. This process of
elimination approach to troubleshooting causes the loss
of valuable manhours investigating many potential causes
before locating the ultimate source of the problem.
The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform enables a top
down approach to troubleshooting that enables faster MTTR
so your IT teams can get the issue resolved and celebrate
bottoms up!
Todays approaches to managing service availability are
largely reactive, causing the mobilization of IT staff only after
a problem is reported by the user. The reliance on such triggers may lead to action only after the problem severity has
drastically increased, and after valuable time has elapsed.
nGeniusONEs ability to provide endtoend visibility into multi
tier service delivery environments, combined with a service
triage methodology, helps address the key problems associated
with silospecific, componentbased, bottomup performance
management approaches. Key benefits include the following:
Converges network and application performance management to support a unified service delivery assurance
and management strategy
Delivers both macro and microlevel insights into service performance enterprisewide
Enhances situational awareness with realtime monitoring dashboard and intelligent early warning against
anomalous events
Improves operational efficiency via simplified workflows
with contextually linked analysis layers
22

Reduces MTTR with intelligent, sessionoriented analysis
and highperformance trafficlevel analysis
Enables networkwide capacity planning and service
availability management with flexible customizable
reporting
The nGeniusONE platform delivers valuable macrolevel
insights into the performance of enterprisewide services,
application components, user communities, and server
groups. This expands the IT architects understanding of
service consumption patterns, application component utilization, and overall user experience to better support resource
optimization and capacity planning. Further, by virtue of
being one integrated platform, nGeniusONE provides simplicity in acquisition, deployment, and training of IT staff, thereby
reducing time to productivity.
Chapter 3
Chapter3
Implementing nGeniusONE
in Your Environment
In This Chapter
Setting up services
Viewing dashboards, spaces, and the hierarchy tree
Determining service dependencies
Getting service alerts and monitors
hroughout your organization, the complexity of issues

and the sophistication of your users varies greatly. The
technology and business requirements of each individual
are unique to their role in the success of the enterprise.
The numerous ways that the same information is consumed
and broken down in different environments is complex and
multifaceted.
nGeniusONE is a service delivery management solution that
monitors the network performance and health of links, appli
cations, and services running throughout your organizations
infrastructure, and it is designed specifically to address the
diversity of stakeholders. In this chapter, you find out how to
implement the nGeniusONE platform in your organization.
Understanding nGeniusONE
Services
The nGeniusONE platform supports enterprise and service
provider environments with a servicefocused approach to
24

performance management. This approach enables IT teams to
manage diverse services with a singular easy to understand
approach. In an nGeniusONE deployment, services are catego
rized by type:
Application service: Consists of one or more applica
tions, application groups, or messages combined with
InfiniStream appliance interfaces that are monitoring the
network segment where the specified traffic is present.
These may consist of both single application workloads
and multitiered application servers (such as Microsoft
Exchange).
Network domain: Consists only of ASI (see Chapter2)
physical interfaces and their associated location keys.
nGeniusONE service enablers include protocolspecific moni
tors of fundamental applications essential for all networks,
regardless of the business. These monitors track applica
tions involved in the proper function of almost every network
and arent dedicated to a particular business application.
Examples include Domain Name Service (DNS), Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Lightweight Directory Access
Protocol (LDAP), and Remote Authentication DialIn User
Service (RADIUS).
Application services can be configured in various ways to
optimize monitoring. Citrix, for example, includes multiple
layers in its architecture a hypertext transfer protocol
(HTTP) frontend that connects to endusers, authentication
and other enablers, and backend servers where the enduser
applications are running XenApp or Independent Computing
Architecture (ICA). Services can be created to monitor each
component endusers, frontend HTTP servers, and back
end XenApp servers separately. You can also monitor
applications based on geography by configuring them with
user communities.
To create application services, the application (protocol)
is associated with network domains (segments). Figure31
shows the service configuration for the backend Citrix appli
cations. Drill-down options (Monitors) are selected, and alert
profiles specific to the service can also be configured.
This dashboard shows the status of application services that
were configured to monitor Citrix components. Services were
Chapter3: Implementing nGeniusONE in Your Environment
25
Figure 3-1:The Application Services dashboard displays the status of Citrix

services.
also configured based on user community. In this example,

a significant issue with DNS is evident. Drilldowns from the
dashboard will help the administrator identify which users
are affected and possible root causes.
A service domain is a grouping of application services, net
work domains, and other service domains in a parentchild
relationship. Once defined, services and service domains
can be organized into one or more service hierarchies. Using
nGeniusONE, IT teams have access to predefined, outofthe
box services and can also define their own services for moni
toring in a metricdriven user interface.
These flexible options allow administrators to construct
services, service domains, and hierarchies that align with
their enterprises specific infrastructure, physical sites,
workgroups, geographic regions, or business units. Logical
groupings can be based on users, servers, applications, or
network locations to provide meaningful analysis views. For
example, if an organization wanted to track the delivery of
email services to its different locations, it might set up a ser
vice domain for Email containing services for email delivery
to each of the locations.
In nGeniusONE, an administrator configures services, domains,
and hierarchies in the Service Configuration editor. After ser
vices are configured, operators can view them in nGeniusONE
dashboards and Service Monitors, enabling ITteams to visual
ize how services are delivered to their e
ndusers. This capabil
ity further enables IT teams to proactively identify and triage
performance issues before large numbers of users are affected.
26
Using Dashboards, Spaces, and

the Service Hierarchy Tree
Like an automobile dashboard, nGeniusONE dashboards
provide consolidated visual overviews of the health of
services, service domains, and network domains in your
network although theyre probably not as entertaining as
the bobble-head doll on your car dashboard. Separate tabbed
dashboards for application services and network domains
display continuously updated views, enabling instant recogni
tion of changes in service conditions. This topdown view of
the entire network environment provides highlevel visibility
of issues. Granular drilldown to the individual session and
traffic level is also available. These capabilities greatly reduce
meantimeto-knowledge (MTTK).
There are four dashboards: Network Domain, Application
Services, Unified Communications, and All. The first three
dashboards are described in the following sections. The
Alldashboard provides a single comprehensive view of all
three dashboards. Each dashboard helps you quickly iden
tify and assess problems with business services using the
following key features:
A navigation tree shows your entire service hierarchy
and provides launch points to service monitors, Service
Dependency mapping, and alerts.
Service health is represented using default or
userdefined metrics, such as Failure Percentage,
Transactions, and New Sessions.
Problematic services are highly visible in the grid
because nodes are sorted by severity of the specified pri
mary metric (for example, Failure Percentage). You can
opt to sort the grid by other supported metrics or alpha
betically by Service/Domain name.
Individual services in the grid enable drilldown to asso
ciated specialized service monitors, to the generaluse
Universal Monitor, or to alerts specific to the selected
service or domain.
27
Network Domain Dashboard

The Network Domain Dashboard depicts network domain
health based on total utilization and other metrics. This dash
board is especially useful to network managers, operators,
and others in network performance management.
The default initial view of the Network Domain Dashboard is
for the Enterprise domain, containing all network domains
configured in your environment. Most of the features are the
same as the Application Services Dashboard (discussed in the
next section). However, this dashboard provides the following
information pertinent to network domains
Physical interface/Location key count
Primary and secondary metrics for throughput (by
default, utilization)
When a network domain needs further troubleshooting,
you can click the domain tile to drill down to the Traffic
(Application) Monitor.
Application Services Dashboard

The Application Services Dashboard provides visualization on
a single screen of the health of services based on percentage of
failures and other metrics. The default initial view is a dashboard
for the Enterprise domain, which contains all subdomains and
application services configured in your environment.
The dashboard is laid out as a grid of tiles containing key met
rics for each node. The dashboard displays tiles only for the
services that have data for the specified time period. Each tile
contains the following information:
Name of Service or Domain
Critical (red) and Warning (yellow) alert counts (if
applicable)
Severity circle, which depicts the health of the service
based on the primary metric (by default, percentage of
failed transactions)
Secondary metrics, which display additional default or
userspecified metrics
28

When a service in the dashboard needs further troubleshoot
ing, you can click the tile to drill down to the specialized
monitor associated with the service (as specified in Service
Configuration). If no monitor is associated, the drilldown
will go to the generalpurpose Universal Monitor. You can
also drill down from a tile to the Alert Browser to see a list of
alerts pertaining to the specified service/domain.
Unified Communications
Dashboard
Unified Communications (UC) is all about improving collabo
ration and boosting business productivity. The successful
adoption of UC services, such as VoIP, Video Conferencing,
Telepresence, and Desktop Video, assumes that service
quality will be sufficient for users to interact effectively and
consistently.
Assuring the quality of UC services is not an easy task. UC
services are complex and require unforgiving performance
levels with alwayson availability to meet the high expecta
tions of users and the organization. The reality is that many
UC deployments fail to achieve the internal traction desired
due to poor user experiences.
The UC dashboard, and other nGeniusONE components
including the Media Monitor, specifically address the monitor
ing requirements of multimedia environments (see Figure32).
Figure 3-2:The Media Monitor drilldown from the UC dashboard displays

the status of VoIP connections.
29
These capabilities include

Troubleshooting service degradations including Quality
of Service (QoS) mismatches, oneway calls, packet loss,
and jitter
Measuring the success of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
trunk deployments
Determining how a video initiative will impact data
services
Determining network baselines to measure the impact of
next generation UC deployments
Performance issues are some of the most challenging aspects
of managing UC applications in the enterprise. nGeniusONE
components are specifically designed to triage and resolve UC
problems. The dashboard and other tools can help resolve
issues including poor call quality, oneway audio, grainy
video, or static noise during conference calls. nGeniusONE UC
performance management has visibility into all of these areas:
Network: bandwidth, QoS, firewalls, routing issues
Call servers: server failure or misconfigured codecs,
interoperability
Gateways: echo cancellation issues
Endpoint: noisy microphones, softclient (PC) performance
The UC Dashboard provides realtime visibility into endto
end service performance for voice and video sessions, which
enables powerful analysis and troubleshooting for both pro
active and reactive service management tasks. Providing a
serviceoriented perspective of delivered UC services, the UC
Dashboard enables the IT organization to
Deliver consistent and reliable service levels for Voice
and Video UC services to protect the user experience
Transform service management from reactive to proac
tive to predict and prevent emerging service perfor
mance issues before users are affected
Quickly triage and identify underlying root causes of UC
service performance problems in both the network and
UC service applications
30

Simplify managing complex multilocation, multivendor
UC environments
Optimize and accelerate new UC application rollouts
Spaces
While nGeniusONE Dashboards provide quick visualization of
current service conditions, Dashboard Spaces help adminis
trators troubleshoot problems by providing a more granular
view of application service data over time. The context for
each Space comes from application services configured in
Service Configuration. Views can show data for an entire ser
vice or for a specified service member. If based on a complete
service, the view displays aggregated data for all members of
the service (see Figure33).
Figure 3-3:Spaces display views over time highlighting consistent or intermittent issues.
Service Hierarchy Tree

The service hierarchy tree is a navigation tool available in all
dashboards. The tree shows the hierarchy of domains and ser
vices that have been configured and assigned to you for view
ing. You can expand each domain to see its service members.
If alerts have been generated, the number of critical and warn
ing alert occurrences are indicated with red and yellow icons
for each service and domain. You can also drill down to an
31
alert list to see all alerts that have occurred for a selected ser
vice and time period.
The tree also enables navigation with context to other mod
ules for additional details and views. Selecting a service in the
tree provides the following options from the context menu:
Service Monitor: Provides an ataglance view of
applicationserver or network performance metrics
based on the service context
Service Dependency: Displays a map of the servers that
are engaged in providing a service, their interdependen
cies, and traffic and performance metrics for the servers
Alert List: Shows the alerts triggered on the service includ
ing details describing the nature and severity of the events
Managing Service Dependencies

The Service Dependency tool includes traffic and perfor
mance metrics that allow you to determine if client communi
ties are being affected by a poorly performing server. Service
Dependency is accessible as a menu option when selecting a
service in the Hierarchy tree. Metrics include
Failures (Critical Errors, Failed Transactions, and
Retransmissions)
Server Load (Total Requests, Transaction Rate, and New
Sessions)
Latency (Average Response Time, Slow Responses, and
Timeouts)
For example, Service Dependency may help uncover that a
problem with an email server is preventing a certain client com
munity from using email. It can also be useful in determining if a
server outside of the service definition is affecting performance.
For example, a server within a defined Lightweight Directory
Access Protocol (LDAP) service may appear to be slow, but
Service Dependency may uncover that a Domain Name Service
(DNS) service it is querying is actually causing the bottleneck.
When viewing the Service Dependency map, you can right
click a connection between nodes to drill down to an associ
ated service monitor (see Figure34).
32
Figure 3-4:Service Dependency displays the relationships among servers.
Configuring Alerts and Monitors

When administrators configure nGeniusONE services, they
can enable alerts for the monitored elements and applications
in those services. Service alerts are displayed in the Service
Dashboard and Alert Lists, providing early awareness of pos
sible problems with applications, servers, voice services, or
the network.
When using the dashboard, you see critical (red) and warning
(yellow) alerts on service tiles on the dashboard and in the
Hierarchy tree. You can then drill down to an Alert List for
that service.
Servicebased alerts can be triggered by baselines, thresholds,
or availability metrics:
Baseline alerts: Signal a metric exceeding statistically
derived baselines. Baselines are computed by analyzing
each service member and continuously adjusting to cur
rent behavior. Alerts are automatically generated when
supported metrics rise above the baseline.
Thresholdbased alerts: Signal increasing or decreasing
metrics by comparing transaction counts to userdefined
thresholds. Alerts are automatically generated when sup
ported metrics rise above or fall below the threshold for
the period.
33
Availability: Signals an unavailable server that fails to

acknowledge all TCP SYN (Transmission Control Protocol
Synchronize) requests over a specified threshold during
a 5minute period.
The details and chart for a selected alert provide a compre
hensive summary of the conditions surrounding the event,
including time, location, and trigger values. If even more detail
is needed, you can quickly drill down from an alert in the list
to an associated service monitor.
nGeniusONE provides several categories of service monitors
(including generalpurpose, businessspecific, and protocol
specific) and traffic monitors (application and link specific).
These monitor types enable you to analyze relevant metrics
to triage application, server, and network performance affect
ing user experience.
Service and Traffic Monitors help operators determine where
(on what monitored element) an issue occurred, when it
occurred, which application and server were involved, and
which users were affected. You can access monitors directly
from the nGeniusONE Console or from services in the Service
Dashboard, Service Dependency, or service alerts to quickly
reach resolution from the level of an enterprisewide service
outage to individual transactions and traffic.
Monitors are categorized as Service Monitors, Service
Enablers, Network Management, and Traffic Monitors:
Service Monitors include monitors relevant to specific
businesses and their associated protocols, such as
Card Processing and Call Server monitors. Typically,
metrics are based on applicationspecific ID messages
with domainrelevant labeling. Example details include
responsiveness (latency), server load (quantity of data),
and specific failure conditions and rates of failures.
The generalpurpose Universal Monitor acts as an access
point for all predefined monitors, userdefined services,
and configured monitored elements. By filtering the data
within the Universal Monitor interface, you can easily
delve into an application, a physical link, or a service to
display and triage network and application events and
pinpoint probable causes.
34

Service Enablers include protocolspecific (for example,
DNS and LDAP) monitors of fundamental applications
essential for all networks, regardless of the business.
Unlike the businessspecific monitors in the Service
Monitor category, these monitors track applications
involved in the proper function of almost every net
work and are not dedicated to a particular business
application.
The Network Management category includes monitors
that enable analysis of network data such as SNMP
(Simple Network Management Protocol) and NetFlow.
The Traffic Monitor group includes Link Monitor and
Application Traffic Monitor. Link Monitor is used to ana
lyze traffic patterns for applications, discovered applica
tions, and vital signs on selected Monitored Elements
or network domains. Application Traffic Monitor is used
to perform traffic analysis based on applications, appli
cation groups, and locations with volume metrics for
selected Monitored Elements or network domains.
Each monitor provides a correlated view of relevant metrics
for a selected interval as well as contextual charts for visual
analysis and further isolation of results. Key metrics are cor
related with other critical measures, such as application and
link throughput volume, successful and failed transactions,
application error codes, new sessions, and server counts.
Chapter 4
Chapter4
Exploring Service
Assurance Using
nGeniusONE
In This Chapter
Addressing unique industry issues in the enterprise
Looking at service provider challenges
ll modern organizations need continuous realtime

monitoring and comprehensive service assurance.
This chapter presents actual enterprise and service provider
use case examples that demonstrate how service assurance
enables better outcomes. nGeniusONE can be implemented
into service assurance strategies in countless ways to fit each
organizations unique needs in any industry. The platform can
address practically every IP network requirement.
An Enterprise Use Case

Enterprise service assurance needs and use cases support
missioncritical business functions that can literally be a
matter of life or death such as in a hospital. Many proprietary systems are unique to the healthcare industry. A
number of other missioncritical systems are commonly found
in healthcare and also other industries including the public
sector, financial services, manufacturing, higher education,
and retail. The use case in this section is an example from the
healthcare industry, but many of the challenges are similar
and relevant to other enterprise industries as well.
36

A large Florida childrens hospital with a staff of 3,000, including more than 650 attending physicians, has recently undertaken several major IT initiatives. One of the most significant
projects is an institutionwide rollout of a Cerner Electronic
Medical Record (EMR) system that connects and provides
critical-care collaboration between physicians, staff, and
patients. The Cerner EMR solution automates processes
between departments such as emergency care, laboratory,
surgery, radiology, and pharmacy. The new EMR system also
includes a hospitalwide Computerized Physician Order Entry
(CPOE) system and Picture Archiving Communications System
(PACS). The EMR system is also integrated into other applications that are critical for hospital operations and patient care.
Other applications and services that are vital to the operation of the hospital include Microsoft Exchange email, Oracle
applications and databases, and Lawson Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) systems (see Figure41). In addition, Voice
over IP (VoIP) and telemedicine video conferencing have
become increasingly important applications for the hospital
to facilitate realtime consultation between medical specialists
located on and off campus. The ability to provide alwayson
access to all of these systems is essential to the effective
operation of hospital and patient care services.
Figure 4-1:nGeniusONEs Universal Monitor helped the hospital quickly

isolate a load balancer issue that was impacting Microsoft
Exchange email services.
Chapter4: Exploring Service Assurance Using nGeniusONE
37
The hospital deployed nGeniusONE for a number of essential

tasks associated with managing and assuring the delivery
of services and applications to its users. A big driver for the
deployment was to support the rollout of the systems automation and Cerner EMR project. For this project, the hospital
needed to provide critical visibility into the health and availability of delivered services. Management wanted all IT teams
to have the same insight into service performance, and the
ability to work from the same metrics to improve collaboration and effectively address issues that could arise.
The hospital leveraged nGeniusONE to create Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) to enable monitoring and alerting of critical applications and to address IT service management needs. nGeniusONE provides 24/7 service visibility,
servicelevel baselining, bandwidth utilization for capacity
planning, troubleshooting using intelligent deeptraffic analysis, and preproduction testing to assure the smooth rollout of
new applications and services.
ServiceProvider Use Case

A leading provider of wireless voice and data communications delivers a wide array of services to millions of mobile
subscribers in North America. The service provider has been
upgrading its network with the deployment of a Long Term
Evolution (LTE) architecture and IP Multimedia Subsystem
(IMS) components. These upgrades deliver innovative, high
speed mobile data services to their customers.
The service provider leveraged nGeniusONE to provide visibility into its LTE/Evolved Packet Core network in support
of its VoLTE (Voice over LTE) nextgeneration voice service.
VoLTE networks are highly complex because both the LTE
and IMS networks must operate in concert to deliver this service. Figure 4-2 identifies the primary problems seen in the
core functions critical to delivering VoLTE services across its
LTE and IMS environments. nGenius InfiniStream appliances
were deployed in each of the regions where LTE and IMS were
implemented to provide continuous deeptraffic capture and
real-time analysis of the serviceenabling traffic on these links.
38
Figure 4-2:nGeniusONE monitors the complexity of VoLTE networks.
When the nGeniusONE dashboard displayed an alert on the

Home Subscriber Server (HSS) in the LTE core, technicians
were able to quickly identify a problem with the registration
process that was preventing subscribers from accessing multimedia services. The nGeniusONE dashboard detected a performance issue with Diameterbased multimedia authorization
requests. nGeniusONE provided the context and details for
the technicians to understand where the problem was occurring and determine which services were affected. They were
able to quickly resolve the issue and verify that the services
were functioning normally.
nGeniusONE has enabled this service provider to implement a service delivery solution across its LTE networks
and in its IMS core. The flexible service representations
within nGeniusONE help them to quickly identify and resolve
issues with enabling applications. These protocols support
their customers abilities to access critical services over
the LTE and IMS network domains. The comprehensive
workflows in nGeniusONE take operations teams from an
indication of abnormal behavior to graphical views of key
performance indicators (KPIs). They can also launch into
protocollevel decode views of the corresponding traffic.
nGeniusONE provides the performance intelligence that service providers need to understand the impact of an issue on
user experience, the services affected, the problem location,
and the root cause.
Chapter 5
Chapter5
Ten Benefits of
nGeniusONE Service
Assurance
In This Chapter
Maintaining service delivery management
Enabling Unified Communications
Monitoring the enduser experience
Recognizing the business benefits of nGeniusONE Service Assurance
etScouts nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform is

a sophisticated solution for complex IT and business
environments. Ultimately it gives the CIO peace of mind that
critical applications are being continuously monitored. In this
chapter, you discover ten benefits of service assurance.
Service Delivery Management

Maintaining servicelevel agreements (SLAs) for performance
and uptime requires proactive management of complex networks and systems. nGeniusONE enables IT organizations to
Converge network and application performance management to support a unified service delivery assurance and
management strategy
Deliver both macro and microlevel insights into service
performance across the entire enterprise
40

Enhance situational awareness with continuous realtime
monitoring and intelligent early warning of anomalous
events
Improve operational efficiency via simplified workflows
with contextually linked analysis layers
Service Triage and Root

CauseAnalysis
Many IT organizations today use an ineffective and costly
bottomup approach to service management. These IT organizations are illequipped with ad hoc monitoring tools such
as network performance management (NPM), application
performance management (APM), and log data analytics. These
silospecific tools limit them to reactive troubleshooting.
nGeniusONE enables a topdown service triage methodology using comprehensive data. It provides meaningful and
contextual endtoend visibility across the organizations
entire service delivery infrastructure. These capabilities
ultimately reduce meantimetorepair (MTTR) and reduce
operational costs.
Unified Communications
Performance Management
Unified Communications (UC) enables smarter collaboration
and improved business productivity when it works. UC
services are complex and require extremely high performance
levels with alwayson availability in order to meet the growing
demands of users and the organization.
nGeniusONE provides realtime, actionable intelligence that
enables desktop, network, telecom, and application teams to
see UC through the same lens. It enables IT organizations to
Proactively avoid performance degradations and service
outages
Quickly triage and identify underlying root causes of UC
service issues
Chapter5: Ten Benefits of nGeniusONE Service Assurance
41
Easily manage service delivery across complex multi

location, multivendor UC environments
Consistently and reliably deliver appropriate service
levels for voice and video
Efficiently deploy and optimize new UC applications
Capacity Planning
andOptimization
nGeniusONE enables proactive enterprisewide capacity planning by providing IT teams with traffic monitors and customizable reports that display storage, bandwidth, memory, and
processing utilization. This capability helps keep IT projects
on budget and on time, and takes the guesswork out of properly sizing and optimizing new systems and applications.
nGeniusONE can also be used with load balancers and virtualization platforms. With proactive monitoring of utilization,
load balancers can be scripted to spin up additional virtual
application or web servers when necessary. These resources
can then be automatically deactivated when they are no
longer needed. Similarly, network links can be intelligently
optimized with Quality of Service (QoS) and Class of Service
(CoS) tagging when network managers have actionable, real
time data on bandwidth usage.
User Experience Monitoring

Backend infrastructure is critical, but ultimately its the quality of the user experience that determines the perceived
success of any IT organization. A robust data center architecture means little if an organizations users dont have fast,
ondemand access to their applications and data from anywhere, at any time, and on any device. nGeniusONE provides
visibility from the data center to the endusers device and
everything in between.
42
Network Monitoring Fabric

A highdensity monitoring fabric provides the scale, capacity,
and flexibility needed to efficiently and intelligently manage
network traffic for performance management and security
purposes. The monitoring fabric enables IT to gain holistic
visibility into all network traffic from key vantage points. Key
benefits of nGeniusONEs passive, nondisruptive network
monitoring fabric include the ability to
Enable comprehensive network monitoring, performance
management, and security compliance
Monitor highdensity, highgrowth locations in data
center and private/hybrid cloud environments
Enhance dependability of performance monitoring with
highperformance connectivity and low latency
Data Center Modernization

Virtualization and consolidation initiatives enable IT organizations to modernize their data center operations and improve
operational efficiency. Here are some ways that you can use
the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to support data
center modernization:
Correlate performance metrics endtoend across physical, virtual, and hybrid data center infrastructures
Consolidate service performance monitoring functionality to gain a holistic and contextual endtoend view
Proactively detect and triage problems to pinpoint
and repair root causes of service degradations more
effectively
Consolidate infrastructure with intelligent traffic aggregation, distribution, and filters
ASI provides branch and remote connection visibility, management of core connectivity protocols, and physical and virtual data center management.
Chapter5: Ten Benefits of nGeniusONE Service Assurance
43
Branch Office Visibility

Whether operating across a campus or across the globe, visibility across geographically dispersed organizations is always
a challenge. nGeniusONE provides IT teams with the information they need to ensure that their users can be productive
regardless of where they are.
Branch or remote offices often have limited or no on-site IT
support resources. Troubleshooting a network, system, or
application issue with only the information that a remote
user can provide is challenging and inherently reactive.
nGeniusONE provides the tools necessary to remotely monitor remote office user experience.
IT Operational Excellence
IT operational excellence requires building a serviceoriented
IT organization that is closely aligned with the business and
can rapidly and flexibly deliver and support new and existing products, services, and processes. nGeniusONE helps IT
teams achieve operational excellence by empowering them to
Assure business service availability/continuity
Simplify management of complex service delivery
environments
Reduce operations and support cost and complexity
Proactively detect service degradations and resolve
issues before they impact users
Increase the efficiency and utilization of existing service
delivery infrastructure
Break down operational and toolbased silos
44
Network Visualization
andAwareness
Understanding your network architecture is critical for
effective optimization and troubleshooting. As networks
have become more complex, so has the task of visualizing
and documenting the physical, virtual, and logical network.
nGeniusONE helps IT teams visualize and maintain awareness
of a constantly evolving network architecture that includes
equipment, IP addressing, traffic flows, and system/service
dependencies.
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Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition

Key Contributors: Jim McNeil,

Chapter 1: Whats the Big Deal about

Chapter 2: Introducing the nGeniusONE Service

Chapter 3: Implementing nGeniusONE

Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition 

Chapter 4: Exploring Service Assurance Using

Chapter 5: Ten Benefits of nGeniusONE

ake up to the fact that #ThereIsNoOff, and you need a

Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition 

About This Book

Icons Used in This Book

Beyond the Book

Where to Go from Here

Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition 

Whats the Big Deal about

his chapter describes the challenges that enterprises

Key Technology Trends

Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition 

Figure 1-1:IT issue resolution is costly.

Several important trends have emerged to enable advanced

Chapter1: Whats the Big Deal about Service Assurance?

Mobility: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies have

Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition 

Figure 1-2:Service assurance across the entire network.

Service Assurance for

Chapter1: Whats the Big Deal about Service Assurance?

Optimize operational processes to take advantage of

Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition 

Figure 1-3:Service provider and MSO networks are complex.

NETSCOUTs nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform

Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition 