NetScout E.book For Dummies

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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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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: What’s the Big Deal about

Service Assurance? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .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

in Your Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .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 Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition
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

Service Assurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Service Delivery Management ................................................ 39
Service Triage and Root Cause Analysis ............................... 40
Unified Communications Performance Management .......... 40
Capacity Planning and Optimization ..................................... 41
User Experience Monitoring ................................................... 41
Network Monitoring Fabric..................................................... 42
Data Center Modernization..................................................... 42
Branch Office Visibility ........................................................... 43
IT Operational Excellence ....................................................... 43
Network Visualization and Awareness .................................. 44
Introduction
W ake up to the fact that #ThereIsNoOff, and you need a
new solution to manage this reality. Unless you’re still
using a rotary phone, your company’s network is the water
supply to your business. While the strategic importance of
delivering IP‐based services is constantly increasing, enter-
prises and service providers are being pressured to find ways
to deliver these services faster, with higher quality, while
reducing operating cost.
Unfortunately, the traditional bottom‐up triage methodology

based on multi‐vendor silo‐specific Network Performance
Management (NPM), Application Performance Management
(APM), and log data analytics tools is ineffective and
doesn’t offer a holistic service-level triage capabilities to IT
organizations.
Because the bottom‐up triage methodology relies on data

that’s spread across multiple, disparate tools, it conceals
the problem until the end, when the phone is ringing and
your service is degraded! This compartmentalized old‐school
model of service delivery monitoring inhibits the ability to
triage service degradations effectively, significantly increases
mean‐time‐to‐resolution (MTTR), and extends the time spent
in the war room pointing fingers. The overall result of relying
on the bottom‐up triage methodology is drastically increased
service unavailability, reduced quality of end‐user experience,
and loss in productivity.
Enterprises and service providers need a comprehensive

service assurance solution that enables end‐to‐end visibil-
ity across service delivery environments to gain real‐time,
actionable intelligence for exceptional service performance.
Continuous real‐time monitoring is a must! To be truly effec-
tive, the solution needs to offer proactive service triage
capabilities to reduce MTTR by identifying the root cause of
service degradations to prevent outages.
2 Service Assurance For Dummies, NETSCOUT Special Edition
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, transpor-
tation, 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 ser-
vice action and transaction is conducted over the network,
it’s only natural to rely on traffic‐based insight for service
assurance. This book describes best practices for proactively
collecting, organizing, analyzing, and visualizing traffic data
in real‐time to deliver end‐to‐end service assurance for enter-
prises and service providers.
Foolish Assumptions
It’s been said that most assumptions have outlived their
uselessness, but I’ll 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 service‐level agreements (SLAs)
and uptime requirements for maintaining network and appli-
cation availability 24/7/365. Finally, I assume that you’re a
business or technical decision maker, such as a CIO or IT
manager, evaluating service assurance solutions for your
organization. If that’s 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. Here’s 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 3
You won’t find a map of the human genome here, but if you
seek to attain the seventh level of NERD‐vana, 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, there’s 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 NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE platform at these
links:
✓ www.netscout.com/education/overview/
resources
✓ www.netscout.com/solution/enterprise
✓ www.netscout.com/solution/service‐provider
Where to Go from Here

If you don’t know where you’re going, any chapter will get
you there — but Chapter 1 might be a good place to start!
However, if you see a particular topic that piques your inter-
est in the table of contents, feel free to jump ahead to that
chapter. Each chapter is individually wrapped (but not pack-
aged for individual sale) and written to stand on its own,
so you can start reading anywhere and skip around to your
heart’s content! Read this book in any order that suits you
(though I don’t recommend upside down or backwards).
Chapter 1
What’s 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
T his chapter describes the challenges that enterprises

and service providers are facing by using traditional
bottom‐up 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. There’s 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 Figure 1-1),
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.
Chapter 1: What’s the Big Deal about Service Assurance? 7
✓ 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 work‐related purposes. But BYOD isn’t 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 (machine‐to‐machine), leads
to a point in time when the majority of Internet traffic is
generated by “things” rather than by human‐operated
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 it’s a critical role. Proactive, real‐time monitoring is a
must to ensure ongoing, optimal service (see Figure 1-2).
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 traffic‐level 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. Mean‐time‐to‐knowledge (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 Chapter 2.
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 IP‐based services to their end‐users.
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)
Chapter 1: What’s the Big Deal about Service Assurance? 9
✓ Optimize operational processes to take advantage of
organizational efficiencies and cost reduction made
possible by the migration to all‐IP networks
The proliferation of IP‐based 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, network‐element alarm focus, to a proactive
approach that centers on quality of service and end‐to‐end
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 multi‐service
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 customer’s 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 Figure 1-3). 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-
ator’s span of control as well as external to it (for example,
third‐party content). Successfully assuring the user experi-
ence in today’s IP multi‐service 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 end‐to‐end service
delivery supply chain.
Figure 1-3: Service provider and MSO networks are complex.
NETSCOUT’s 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 Chapter 2.
Chapter 2
Introducing the
nGeniusONE Service
Assurance Platform
In This Chapter
▶ Looking at the service assurance solution
▶ Exploring additional capabilities in nGeniusONE
▶ Solving operational challenges proactively
Y our organization needs a solution that has holistic vis-

ibility and global reach — a crystal ball that can monitor
your service delivery infrastructure from a high level but also
has deep‐dive troubleshooting capabilities. Although not quite
a crystal ball, NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE platform, powered by
patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology, is a
service assurance architecture that addresses this complexity
in a comprehensive, cost‐effective way. In this chapter, you
discover how the nGeniusONE platform and ASI technology
can help assure service delivery and provide efficient ser-
vice triage. You also learn how nGeniusONE provides these
capabilities with pervasive end‐to‐end visibility across physi-
cal, virtual, and hybrid service delivery environments, and
addresses IT operational challenges.
Service Assurance Solution

Overview
In highly scalable enterprise and service provider infrastruc-
tures, identifying the root cause of service degradation,
referred to as mean‐time-to‐knowledge (MTTK), can consume
as much as 90 percent of the overall mean‐time-to‐repair
(MTTR). NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution
offers efficient service triage which can substantially reduce
MTTK based on pervasive end‐to‐end visibility across physi-
cal, virtual, and hybrid service delivery environments (see
Figure 2-1). The triage is performed proactively by detecting
service degradations in real‐time, 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: nGeniusONE’s ASI technology helps reduce MTTK.
nGeniusONE’s pervasive and scalable data collection is estab-

lished 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 non‐intrusive, and can scale to collect any
required volume of data.
Chapter 2: Introducing the nGeniusOne Platform 13
The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform aggregates, cor-
relates, and contextually analyzes the metadata gathered from
data sources in physical and virtual environments. It then
creates real‐time holistic views of service performance, estab-
lishes performance baselines, and facilitates service‐oriented
troubleshooting workflows.
Adaptive Service Intelligence

(ASI)
Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) is nGeniusONE’s secret
sauce — patented technology that uses a rich traffic‐flow
data Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine to generate highly
scalable metadata. The metadata enables a comprehensive,
real‐time and historic view of service, network, application,
and server performance. It generates metadata based on
actual session traffic in real‐time as the traffic crosses physi-
cal or virtual links. The generated metadata provides impor-
tant 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 founda-
tion of a highly scalable service delivery monitoring archi-
tecture 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
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, end‐to‐end per-
formance and availability management for diverse business
services (see Figure 2-2).
Figure 2-2: The nGeniusONE platform.
By using a single cohesive, consistent set of analytics and
views, based on one common database of metadata, the
nGeniusONE platform improves communication and col-
laboration 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 pro-

viding the following key analysis layers:
✓ Service Dashboard provides real‐time, at‐a‐glance,

holistic status visibility of all business services and their
network and application components. The dashboard
also delivers alarms and analytics‐based, 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
client‐server relationships.
✓ Performance analysis enables comprehensive, multi‐
dimensional analysis of application and network perfor-
mance of all dependencies. This analysis layer includes
pre‐defined service monitors for common enterprise
services, a customizable service monitor to support
user‐defined service environments, and a Traffic Monitor
for network performance management.
✓ Session Analysis enables session‐level analysis with hop‐
by‐hop transaction analysis.
✓ Deep‐Dive Traffic Analysis enables expert traffic‐ and
protocol‐level analysis and forensic evidence collection
(see Figure 2-3).
This approach dramatically reduces mean‐time‐to‐repair

(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.
Figure 2-3: nGeniusONE top‐down service‐oriented workflows.
The nGeniusONE platform provides pervasive continuous

visibility into the service delivery environment and offers pro-
active 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
of nGeniusONE
In addition to delivering core service assurance and manage-
ment capabilities, nGeniusONE includes additional capa-
bilities, such as nGenius Intelligent Data Sources, network
discovery and mapping, advanced search, and session and
traffic analysis.
Intelligent Data Sources
nGenius Intelligent Data Sources combine real‐time, action-
able intelligence with pervasive, traffic‐based visibility of all
application and service traffic that flows across your IP net-
work for proactive service assurance. nGenius Intelligent Data
Sources help you
✓ Exploit the richness of traffic flow data to provide granu-

lar 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, real‐time, and historical service‐level 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 2-4). From Global Settings, you can then
label and mark them for monitoring in the configuration data-
base. 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 client’s
address is searched, Search and Discover also looks for the
nGeniusONE server, which applications are talking to this
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 associa-
tions 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 moni-

tors. 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)
✓ CompID
✓ CellID
✓ Location keys (such as sites, access point name, hand-
sets, 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 analy-
sis in the other panes.
✓ Session Trace: Ladder diagram depicting correlated
flows with response times for the selection made in the
Session Overview pane. Figure 2-5 shows an example of
an LDAP session trace.
✓ Session Summary: This pane contains one or more
tables summarizing characteristics of the entities associ-
ated 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, protocol‐level analysis and forensic evidence collection,
using either real‐time 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 real‐time data capture immediately.
Figure 2-5: This Session Analysis ladder diagram shows an Authentication

Method error.
Data Mining is also available when using the drill‐down 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 appli-
ance. 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
Today’s IT operations largely rely on multiple functional
teams using silo‐specific 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 specific‐point 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
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 verifica-
tion and exclusion until the root cause is reached. The lack
of unified visibility impedes the adoption of a structured,
top‐down approach to problem resolution. This “process of
elimination” approach to troubleshooting causes the loss
of valuable man‐hours 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!
Today’s 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 trig-
gers may lead to action only after the problem severity has
drastically increased, and after valuable time has elapsed.
nGeniusONE’s ability to provide end‐to‐end visibility into multi‐

tier service delivery environments, combined with a service
triage methodology, helps address the key problems associated
with silo‐specific, component‐based, bottom‐up performance
management approaches. Key benefits include the following:
✓ Converges network and application performance man-

agement to support a unified service delivery assurance
and management strategy
✓ Delivers both macro‐ and micro‐level insights into ser-
vice performance enterprise‐wide
✓ Enhances situational awareness with real‐time moni-
toring dashboard and intelligent early warning against
anomalous events
✓ Improves operational efficiency via simplified workflows
with contextually linked analysis layers
✓ Reduces MTTR with intelligent, session‐oriented analysis

and high‐performance traffic‐level analysis
✓ Enables network‐wide capacity planning and service
availability management with flexible customizable
reporting
The nGeniusONE platform delivers valuable macro‐level

insights into the performance of enterprise‐wide services,
application components, user communities, and server
groups. This expands the IT architect’s understanding of
service consumption patterns, application component utiliza-
tion, and overall user experience to better support resource
optimization and capacity planning. Further, by virtue of
being one integrated platform, nGeniusONE provides simplic-
ity in acquisition, deployment, and training of IT staff, thereby
reducing time to productivity.
Chapter 3
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
T 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 organization’s
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 service‐focused approach to
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 Chapter 2)
physical interfaces and their associated location keys.
nGeniusONE service enablers include protocol‐specific 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 aren’t 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 Dial‐In 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) front‐end that connects to end‐users, authentication
and other enablers, and back‐end servers where the end‐user
applications are running XenApp or Independent Computing
Architecture (ICA). Services can be created to monitor each
component — end‐users, front‐end 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). Figure 3-1
shows the service configuration for the back‐end 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
Chapter 3: 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 parent‐child
relationship. Once defined, services and service domains
can be organized into one or more service hierarchies. Using
nGeniusONE, IT teams have access to predefined, out‐of‐the
box services and can also define their own services for moni-
toring in a metric‐driven user interface.
These flexible options allow administrators to construct

services, service domains, and hierarchies that align with
their enterprise’s 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 IT teams to visual-
ize how services are delivered to their end‐users. This capabil-
ity further enables IT teams to proactively identify and triage
performance issues before large numbers of users are affected.
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 they’re 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 top‐down view of
the entire network environment provides high‐level visibility
of issues. Granular drilldown to the individual session and
traffic level is also available. These capabilities greatly reduce
mean‐time‐to-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
All dashboard 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
user‐defined 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 general‐use
Universal Monitor, or to alerts specific to the selected
service or domain.
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
user‐specified metrics
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 general‐purpose 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 always‐on 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 Figure 3-2).
Figure 3-2: The Media Monitor drilldown from the UC dashboard displays
the status of VoIP connections.
These capabilities include
✓ Troubleshooting service degradations including Quality

of Service (QoS) mismatches, one‐way 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, one‐way 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, soft‐client (PC) performance
The UC Dashboard provides real‐time visibility into end‐to‐

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
service‐oriented 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
✓ Simplify managing complex multi‐location, multi‐vendor

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 Figure 3-3).
Figure 3-3: Spaces display views over time highlighting consistent or inter-
mittent 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
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 at‐a‐glance view of

application‐server 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 Figure 3-4).
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.
Service‐based 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.
✓ Threshold‐based alerts: Signal increasing or decreasing
metrics by comparing transaction counts to user‐defined
thresholds. Alerts are automatically generated when sup-
ported metrics rise above or fall below the threshold for
the period.
✓ Availability: Signals an unavailable server that fails to
acknowledge all TCP SYN (Transmission Control Protocol
Synchronize) requests over a specified threshold during
a 5‐minute 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 general‐purpose, business‐specific, 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 enterprise‐wide 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 application‐specific ID messages
with domain‐relevant labeling. Example details include
responsiveness (latency), server load (quantity of data),
and specific failure conditions and rates of failures.
The general‐purpose Universal Monitor acts as an access
point for all predefined monitors, user‐defined 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.
✓ Service Enablers include protocol‐specific (for example,

DNS and LDAP) monitors of fundamental applications
essential for all networks, regardless of the business.
Unlike the business‐specific 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
Exploring Service
Assurance Using
nGeniusONE
In This Chapter
▶ Addressing unique industry issues in the enterprise
▶ Looking at service provider challenges
A ll modern organizations need continuous real‐time

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
organization’s 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
mission‐critical business functions that can literally be a
matter of life or death — such as in a hospital. Many pro-
prietary systems are unique to the healthcare industry. A
number of other mission‐critical 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.
A large Florida children’s hospital with a staff of 3,000, includ-

ing more than 650 attending physicians, has recently under-
taken several major IT initiatives. One of the most significant
projects is an institution‐wide 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 hospital‐wide Computerized Physician Order Entry
(CPOE) system and Picture Archiving Communications System
(PACS). The EMR system is also integrated into other applica-
tions that are critical for hospital operations and patient care.
Other applications and services that are vital to the opera-

tion of the hospital include Microsoft Exchange email, Oracle
applications and databases, and Lawson Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) systems (see Figure 4-1). In addition, Voice
over IP (VoIP) and telemedicine video conferencing have
become increasingly important applications for the hospital
to facilitate real‐time consultation between medical specialists
located on and off campus. The ability to provide always‐on
access to all of these systems is essential to the effective
operation of hospital and patient care services.
Figure 4-1: nGeniusONE’s Universal Monitor helped the hospital quickly

isolate a load balancer issue that was impacting Microsoft
Exchange email services.
Chapter 4: 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 auto-
mation and Cerner EMR project. For this project, the hospital
needed to provide critical visibility into the health and avail-
ability 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 collabora-
tion and effectively address issues that could arise.
The hospital leveraged nGeniusONE to create Key

Performance Indicators (KPIs) to enable monitoring and alert-
ing of critical applications and to address IT service manage-
ment needs. nGeniusONE provides 24/7 service visibility,
service‐level baselining, bandwidth utilization for capacity
planning, troubleshooting using intelligent deep‐traffic analy-
sis, and pre‐production testing to assure the smooth rollout of
new applications and services.
Service Provider Use Case

A leading provider of wireless voice and data communica-
tions 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 vis-

ibility into its LTE/Evolved Packet Core network in support
of its VoLTE (Voice over LTE) next‐generation voice service.
VoLTE networks are highly complex because both the LTE
and IMS networks must operate in concert to deliver this ser-
vice. 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 deep‐traffic capture and
real-time analysis of the service‐enabling traffic on these links.
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 mul-
timedia services. The nGeniusONE dashboard detected a per-
formance issue with Diameter‐based multimedia authorization
requests. nGeniusONE provided the context and details for
the technicians to understand where the problem was occur-
ring 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 imple-

ment 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
protocol‐level decode views of the corresponding traffic.
nGeniusONE provides the performance intelligence that ser-
vice providers need to understand the impact of an issue on
user experience, the services affected, the problem location,
and the root cause.
Chapter 5
Ten Benefits of
nGeniusONE Service
Assurance
In This Chapter
▶ Maintaining service delivery management
▶ Enabling Unified Communications
▶ Monitoring the end‐user experience
▶ Recognizing the business benefits of nGeniusONE Service Assurance
N etScout’s 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 service‐level agreements (SLAs) for performance
and uptime requires proactive management of complex net-
works and systems. nGeniusONE enables IT organizations to
✓ Converge network and application performance manage-

ment to support a unified service delivery assurance and
management strategy
✓ Deliver both macro‐ and micro‐level insights into service
performance across the entire enterprise
✓ Enhance situational awareness with continuous real‐time

monitoring and intelligent early warning of anomalous
events
✓ Improve operational efficiency via simplified workflows
with contextually linked analysis layers
Service Triage and Root

Cause Analysis
Many IT organizations today use an ineffective and costly
bottom‐up approach to service management. These IT orga-
nizations are ill‐equipped with ad hoc monitoring tools such
as network performance management (NPM), application
performance management (APM), and log data analytics. These
silo‐specific tools limit them to reactive troubleshooting.
nGeniusONE enables a top‐down service triage methodol-

ogy using comprehensive data. It provides meaningful and
contextual end‐to‐end visibility across the organization’s
entire service delivery infrastructure. These capabilities
ultimately reduce mean‐time‐to‐repair (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 always‐on availability in order to meet the growing
demands of users and the organization.
nGeniusONE provides real‐time, 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
Chapter 5: Ten Benefits of nGeniusONE Service Assurance 41
✓ Easily manage service delivery across complex multi‐
location, multi‐vendor UC environments
✓ Consistently and reliably deliver appropriate service
levels for voice and video
✓ Efficiently deploy and optimize new UC applications
Capacity Planning
and Optimization
nGeniusONE enables proactive enterprise‐wide capacity plan-
ning by providing IT teams with traffic monitors and custom-
izable 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 prop-
erly sizing and optimizing new systems and applications.
nGeniusONE can also be used with load balancers and virtu-

alization 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 it’s the qual-
ity of the user experience that determines the perceived
success of any IT organization. A robust data center archi-
tecture means little if an organization’s users don’t have fast,
on‐demand access to their applications and data from any-
where, at any time, and on any device. nGeniusONE provides
visibility from the data center to the end‐user’s device and
everything in between.
Network Monitoring Fabric

A high‐density 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 nGeniusONE’s passive, non‐disruptive network
monitoring fabric include the ability to
✓ Enable comprehensive network monitoring, performance

management, and security compliance
✓ Monitor high‐density, high‐growth locations in data
center and private/hybrid cloud environments
✓ Enhance dependability of performance monitoring with
high‐performance connectivity and low latency
Data Center Modernization

Virtualization and consolidation initiatives enable IT organiza-
tions 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 end‐to‐end across physi-

cal, virtual, and hybrid data center infrastructures
✓ Consolidate service performance monitoring functional-
ity to gain a holistic and contextual end‐to‐end view
✓ Proactively detect and triage problems to pinpoint
and repair root causes of service degradations more
effectively
✓ Consolidate infrastructure with intelligent traffic aggrega-
tion, distribution, and filters
ASI provides branch and remote connection visibility, man-

agement of core connectivity protocols, and physical and vir-
tual data center management.
Chapter 5: Ten Benefits of nGeniusONE Service Assurance 43
Branch Office Visibility

Whether operating across a campus or across the globe, vis-
ibility across geographically dispersed organizations is always
a challenge. nGeniusONE provides IT teams with the informa-
tion 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 moni-
tor remote office user experience.
IT Operational Excellence
IT operational excellence requires building a service‐oriented
IT organization that is closely aligned with the business and
can rapidly and flexibly deliver and support new and exist-
ing 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 tool‐based silos
Network Visualization
and Awareness
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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Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

NETSCOUT Special Edition

LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR MAKE

Project Editor: Carrie A. Johnson Key Contributors: Jim McNeil,

Chapter 1: What’s the Big Deal about

Chapter 2: Introducing the nGeniusONE Service

Chapter 3: Implementing nGeniusONE

Managing Service Dependencies............................................ 31

Chapter 4: Exploring Service Assurance Using

Chapter 5: Ten Benefits of nGeniusONE

Unfortunately, the traditional bottom‐up triage methodology

Because the bottom‐up triage methodology relies on data

Enterprises and service providers need a comprehensive

About This Book

Next, I assume you work in an enterprise or service provider

Icons Used in This Book

This icon points out information that screams “Remember me

Beyond the Book

Where to Go from Here

T his chapter describes the challenges that enterprises

Key Technology Trends

Organizations need highly reliable IT infrastructures to ensure

According to a 2015 study by Forrester Consulting, the

Figure 1-1: IT issue resolution is costly.

Several important trends have emerged to enable advanced

✓ Public, private, and hybrid clouds: Cloud technolo-

Service assurance is enabled with tools that instrument

Service triage is the practice of identifying the root cause of

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

Service Assurance for

✓ Reduce churn and improve top line revenue growth

The proliferation of IP‐based services has transformed the

Customer satisfaction has many dimensions, but improving

The service delivery supply chain encompasses multiple pro-

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

NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform

Y our organization needs a solution that has holistic vis-

Service Assurance Solution

Figure 2-1: nGeniusONE’s ASI technology helps reduce MTTK.

nGeniusONE’s pervasive and scalable data collection is estab-

Adaptive Service Intelligence

Interconnected tools including the Dashboard, Service

Monitors provide numerous ways to identify and investigate

✓ Which services are affected

nGeniusONE Service Assurance

Figure 2-2: The nGeniusONE platform.

nGeniusONE streamlines service delivery management by pro-

✓ Service Dashboard provides real‐time, at‐a‐glance,

This approach dramatically reduces mean‐time‐to‐repair

Figure 2-3: nGeniusONE top‐down service‐oriented workflows.

The nGeniusONE platform provides pervasive continuous

✓ Traffic flow data

✓ Exploit the richness of traffic flow data to provide granu-

✓ TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP (User

client, and which location is seeing this client — by querying

The feature also supports drilldowns to related service moni-

Session and packet analysis

The Session Analysis feature displays information using three

✓ Session Overview: Summary of criteria for originally

In nGeniusONE, packet analysis can be used to perform deep‐

Figure 2-5: This Session Analysis ladder diagram shows an Authentication

Data Mining is also available when using the drill‐down feature