A Logistics Firm Saves Money and Speeds up Mean Time to Repair 80%

As the company has grown, the customer’s requirements for monitoring their applications and networks have grown in tandem. These requirements have been made more complex by the fact that applications are housed in two separately located data centers. Specifically, the customer had two important needs to address. 

First, the customer was focused on getting visibility into what the users were actually seeing from a user interface (UI) perspective. Many internal and external users had been reporting that applications were “slow,” but the existing tools and logs that focused on their infrastructure did not surface problems or provide insight to allow them to diagnose the causes of those problems.

Second, the infrastructure architecture and network operations teams agreed that it was important to find a way to simplify the enterprise monitoring architecture overall, including end user experience, troubleshooting, and security monitoring. The customer needed to ensure that their monitoring tools had the network access they required while limiting the number of monitoring tools that they needed to purchase. “Keysight Vision ONE helped us deploy our new tools more efficiently and increased our overall monitoring coverage without requiring additional hardware tools. This saved an estimated $140,000 immediately,” said an infrastructure architect.

Increasing Visibility for User Experience Monitoring

The customer selected a UI monitoring tool to provide accurate timestamps for distributed network traffic. This real user information is unobtrusively gathered from access points such as network TAP (test access point) and switched port analyzer (SPAN) ports. This monitoring tool was selected to help alert the IT support teams when an application crosses a preset threshold that indicates a slow response time.

When the implementation team began investigating deployment options internally for their chosen user experience solution, they found that there was a shortage of available network access points for attaching the tool. SPAN ports in their two data centers were already being used for security/intrusion detection devices, data recorders, and network analyzers. In fact, the IT Team was already forced to share SPAN access ports by physically making and breaking connections to add or remove tools as needed, rather than keeping all tools continuously attached as they preferred. 

In order to address this situation, the customer adopted Keysight Vision ONE so that information from each SPAN port or TAP can be shared with multiple tools simultaneously. Two Keysight Vision ONE devices were acquired with one unit deployed in each data center, and the two were interconnected via a 10G link. With this connection in place, the company is now able to monitor any access point in either data center with tools at their primary data center (Data Center 1 in the diagram below). In this way, all of the monitoring tools have complete access to needed traffic.