We use it for our network capacity performance, for the entire ICM backbone core.
In addition, our company uses the solution for unified communication application performance. While it's not my team, there is another team responsible for capacity performance for video and they are using the same NETSCOUT toolset for wireless, wire line, and video.
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.
The valuable features include
- packet analysis
- packet capture
- it's easy to use.
The single pane of glass view is a challenge. I like the graphics, they're easy to understand, but when more digging is required, it's more complicated to get what I'm expecting. Since the challenge for me is the dashboard, I would appreciate having a better view from the dashboard. What I don't know is whether the issue is that our configuration needs work. We probably don't do the mapping and the dependency configuration properly and that may be the reason why my dashboard is not crystal clear.
The solution is pretty stable.
It's also pretty scalable, there is no problem with that. It can be expensive, but if you have a good configuration, based on what you are looking for, it's okay, it's manageable.
The technical support is very good. We are well supported by the team. Even with the PULSE - I am new on this team, I have been here less than a year - they were there all the time, on a regular basis, to provide support on that completely new application for us. We were asking very simple questions and they were always there for us. It's been a great collaboration.
The initial setup would be complex for me, since I don't have that kind of talent, but it was pretty simple for my guys.
On my team, we are doing the implementation. Other teams within the company are using third-parties to do the deployment. But on my side, it's all internal people.
We're losing a thousand per minute when we're down. Being able to know where the problem is more quickly, we're going to save a lot of money.
I'm not a big fan of pushing a particular vendor, but it is a very good product: pretty stable, pretty scalable, with a very good and solid engineering team behind it. They are available and listen to customer needs and are always willing to do more to improve their products. But because I don't like to push a product too much, I prefer that people see and try it to see if they like it, to see if it fits their needs.
The tool itself is just fantastic. We've been using it since 2001 or 2002. We are a big fan of the product.
If we are satisfied with what we have, we don't ask for more. It's always about problem resolution or product improvement. We used to have regular, weekly calls with our NETSCOUT rep and, as soon they had a new product, a new version, new updates, they would share them with us, and we would know if we wanted to go in that direction or not. Today, we are quite happy and satisfied with what we have.
We don't yet use the solution for proactive monitoring of SaaS applications or remote sites. We are working on the deployment of PULSE. I can easily imagine that with that new solution deployed in production, we will be able to do more and more proactively. It's not because it's not available with nGeniusONE, it's just that I have no one to check and be proactive.
We will see a decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair, more and more in the coming months, with PULSE. It's more about a business impact. With PULSE, we will have that "radar view", a view of the network, the server, and the application. So instead of needing 15 resources on a call at 2 AM, and losing 45 minutes just to get everyone there to find out what the is problem, with the PULSE solution, we are going to decrease that MTTR dramatically.
Because nGeniusONE is pretty stable and scalable, I would say it's a good nine out of ten.
