Spike in bad calls alleviated by NetScout at large service business

Not to mention winning out over unscrupulous management providers

When a household name, century-old service company began receiving particularly high levels of calls, it wasn't long before incomplete calls and line echoes began to manifest, as is common when a communication network's bandwidth gets overloaded.

"These problems plagued the company for weeks, resulting in a serious challenge for IT," reports the firm.

IT couldn't cope with the issues themselves, as even with in-house component management tools, they just couldn't identify the source of the issues, which by this stage were impacting applications as well as voice calls.

The problem was that the IT department weren't able to take a comprehensive view of the whole network environment.

"IT struggled to evaluate the complete communications path necessary to isolate the source of the problems," notes the company.

"Adding insult to injury, the component management provider offered to upgrade its tools to support voice, video and data services for an exorbitant fee."

The IT department weren't about to take this lying down, and instead looked at picking up NetScout's nGeniusONE service assurance platform

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With a more holistic view of the network enabled by the tools on this platform, it didn't take IT long to find out that firewall trust issues were the root cause of the bad call quality, and calls that were being dropped altogether. But there was more to do besides:

"For the media quality problem of calls suffering from echo, IT leveraged enhanced analysis of the nGenius unified communications licenses," explains NetScout.

"IT learned that the echo problem was being introduced at the user acceptance testing (UAT) and was due to improper QoS (quality of service) class assignments. nGeniusONE proved critical in providing the traffic intelligence needed to rapidly triage and repair the issues."

As well as getting to the bottom of the problem, the fact that NetScout was able to rescue the company from the barrel its component management firm had it over was an excellent win, and more evidence that rather than throwing ‘upgrades' at a problem, taking a wider look at a system and actually eliminating - rather than patching over - faults is usually the more effective path to success.