“Our business operates in real time with extensive automation, so we depend heavily on the corporate network remaining responsive. The number of remote sites and distinct classifications of business services we monitor requires a reliable and highly granular network monitoring system. The nGenius System gives us the visibility we need to serve our user base and keep mission-critical business functions running at high efficiency.”-- Senior Network Engineer, Telecom Engineering Team, CN
Customer Profile - CN, Canadian National Railway Company and its operating railway subsidiaries, spans Canada and mid-America, from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to the Gulf of Mexico, serving the ports of Vancouver, Prince Rupert, B.C., Montreal, Halifax, New Orleans, and Mobile, Ala., and the key metropolitan areas of Toronto, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Duluth, Minn./Superior, Wis., Green Bay, Wis., Minneapolis/St. Paul, Memphis, St. Louis, and Jackson, Miss., with connections to all points in North America.
Vendor Profile - NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT) has been an industry pacesetter for advanced network and service assurance solutions for over a decade, and counts the world's largest enterprises, government agencies, and service providers among its customers. Enterprise and government IT organizations deploy NetScout's nGenius(R) Performance Management System to increase service levels to their users by reducing or preventing service disruptions. Service providers depend on NetScout's proven IP performance management technology and expertise to protect the quality of their customers' experience with IP-based services. NetScout is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts and has offices worldwide.
Problem
CN requires a reliable network and applications to run all aspects of its railroad business.
Challenge
They were experiencing application performance problems and response time delays and were unable to pinpoint the root cause.
Solution
The railway leveraged the analysis in nGenius Performance Manager and nGenius Analytics collected from nGenius Probes to identify bandwidth abuse by nonbusiness-critical applications and software upgrades to thousands of desktops as the cause of the degradations.
Result
Since the deployment of the nGenius Solution, CN has been able to reduce the number of performance management issues, including troubleshooting application performance problems, capacity planning, and collaborative planning for application rollouts.
Introduction
CN is one of the largest railroads in North America, operating a network of 19,200 route miles of track in the United States and Canada. It is the only transcontinental railroad in North America with a network that spans Canada and mid-America, from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to the Gulf of Mexico. CN derives its revenue from the movement of raw resources and finished goods, including petroleum and chemicals, grain and fertilizers, coal, metals and minerals, forest products, and automotive.
The company’s IT network supports more than 22,000 employees who rely on the network to track shipments in real time, process customer service transactions, fulfill order requests and ensure that the company’s extensive, automated rail system operates efficiently and safely.
The company uses a variety of nGenius Probes in combination with several nGenius Performance Manager servers to monitor their WAN links and 1,800-1,900 Cisco switches and routers. Approximately 25 people from a variety of IT groups use the nGenius Solution on a regular basis, with seven of them considered experts. The network services team monitors over 200 applications, many of them custom or complex applications for unique railway operation services. In addition, the network services team has established six QoS levels to prioritize the railway’s business-critical and latency sensitive applications such as the train controls system, reservation system, SAP and VoIP.
Improving Application Performance and Organizational Processes
Since deploying the nGenius Solution, CN has been able to improve performance issues and organizational processes, including troubleshooting application performance problems, capacity planning and collaborative planning for application roll-outs. For example, CN’s networking group has used the nGenius Solution with its strategically placed nGenius Probes to:
- Test the network impact of a Lotus Notes upgrade with the application team prior to full deployment to thousands of desktops;
- Troubleshoot quality problems during a trial VoIP deployment;
- Resolve a situation where a large number of desktop computers were unable to correctly map network drives by using NetScout’s packet capture and analysis capabilities to identify a hidden client-server miscommunication;
- Reduce uncertainty regarding bandwidth capacity by using the more granular 1-minute views of application traffic enabled by NetScout’s High Definition Performance Management technology.
Enhanced Collaboration between IT Groups Leads to Proactive Management of Network Activity
The nGenius Solution enhances collaboration between CN’s various IT groups. Not long ago, people were coming to the network services team complaining the network was slow. Now they’re starting to come to them to see if they can get an nGenius report specific to their application or situation before assigning responsibility. And, better still, they’re even beginning to proactively ask network services to verify that there is adequate bandwidth to complete network intensive tasks without adversely affecting critical business services.
For example, the applications group wanted to upgrade the Lotus Notes client to the latest version. With 100-120MB needing to be pushed out to 15,000 PCs, the application group decided it should first check the effect on the network before proceeding with the update. They scheduled a limited test and asked the network services group to determine the network impact.
Network services used nGenius Analytics’ automated anomaly detection capabilities to prove that there was no significant variance on the network. nGenius Analytics learns a network’s, and its associated applications, behavior patterns and builds a statistical model which it then uses as the baseline to compare current activity against. Because the test update did not trip nGenius Analytics’ dynamically determined thresholds, the team was confident that the updates would not significantly affect the network and was able to give the okay to proceed.
In another situation, a bunch of PCs were taking 30 to 45 minutes to boot up. The PC group suspected it was a problem with the server, so the network services team did a packet trace of one of the PCs making the request to the specific server and was able to confirm the PC group’s suspicions unequivocally. It turns out the PCs were timing out trying to contact the server because they were not able to map their drives correctly.
Support for VoIP and QoS Implementations
CN is also starting to deploy VoIP (voice over IP) in a limited capacity and has probes to monitor and detect converged voice/data traffic at various locations. Recently, CN’s network services used the nGenius Solution to troubleshoot phone problems at the president’s office. Because voice traffic is highly delay sensitive, the team decided to implement quality of service categories to prioritize the voice traffic. NetScout’s QoS management capabilities structure and monitor specific Differentiated Services Code Points (DSCP) that are used to prioritize traffic flows, allowing nGenius Performance Manager to display in-depth graphical real-time and historical views and reports of the associated application traffic by QoS class. As a result, CN was able to confirm that the network was correctly configured and the QoS service was working properly, and the president was able to make clear, jitter-free phone calls.
With a more comprehensive understanding of the impact and effectiveness of QoS traffic management on the total network environment, CN can now better ensure that its networked applications and services are meeting business priorities. While planning a QoS implementation is difficult, it is often an even more daunting challenge to determine whether or not the deployment was successful. Without a means to directly quantify the network traffic utilizing each classification, network services team would have been left to guess whether their prioritization schemes were achieving the desired balance, were unduly impacting or restricting lower priority traffic, or were being compromised by improperly configured network devices.
One-Minute Resolution Provides Essential Granularity
Another situation in which the nGenius Solution proved valuable involved a couple sites in The Netherlands that were complaining about network performance. The network services team used the nGenius Solution with its one-minute granularity to prove unequivocally that they needed more bandwidth.
While the 15-minute average views showed 50% to 55% usage, in reality the peaks were closer to 85% or 90% consumption. Using the nGenius Solution’s one-minute resolution, they were able to provide the users a more accurate picture of their bandwidth usage and give them the necessary ammunition to push the upgrade request through the approval process.
According to the senior network engineer with CN’s Telecom Engineering Team, “The nGenius Probes with one-minute granularity enabled us to easily justify bandwidth requests. In this case, we were able to say explicitly, ‘You’ve only got this much bandwidth for your overhead and that is what is affecting your performance!’
Given the sophisticated nature of CN’s network and the IT organization’s goals to be more proactive in optimizing the network and cutting resolution times, CN requires great intelligence in their approach to application and network performance management. With the full range of capabilities the nGenius Solution provides, CN has access to accurate, reliable alarms with actionable data to optimize delivery of business services over their networks and stay ahead of performance threats.
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