EATEL on Xangati
"The Xangati solution was very quick and easy to install. I can't stop saying how intuitive the interface is, and how easy it is to jump in there and move around and look at things, and be productive without a significant amount of training. I think that's a great achievement for a product, especially considering the complexity of the subject matter."-- Harris Miller, Manager of Engineering, EATEL
Customer Profile - EATEL is a privately owned communications company headquartered in Ascension Parish. Founded in 1935, the company provides services to residents in Ascension and Livingston parishes and is the only company in South Louisiana to offer phone, Internet and TV services over an all-fiber communications network. EATEL provides a broad array of digital programming, including 34 high-definition channels and hundreds of on-demand titles.
Vendor Profile - Xangati provides a rapid problem identification (RPI) system which IT organizations leverage when first responding to end-user, application and network performance and availability issues. Xangati RPI enables its users to swiftly and effectively track down root cause. Enterprises, government organizations and service providers alike use Xangati to accelerate problem identification efforts by at least twenty percentâwhich directly results in major productivity gains for the technical teams and their end-users.
Xangati Rapid Problem Identification Helps EATEL Deliver First-Class Service and Support to their customers!
The Challenges
- Grow market share and reduce costs in competitive IP services market
- Accelerate troubleshooting to maintain reputation for market-leading reliability and customer service
- Minimize the risks posed by malware and spam
The Results
- Reduced time spent on customer support calls by 25%
- Accelerated diagnosis of network and application problems for subscribers
- Reduced customer service costs by eliminating the need for truck rolls to diagnose customer problems
- Assisted training of customer support staff
- Accelerated security attack analysis, reducing response time from hours to minutes, and enabling network engineers to block attacks and protect servers
- Provided product managers with new visibility into customer trends and application usage
Serving a Fast-Growing, Rural County
EATEL, Inc. is an ILEC serving Ascension and Livingston Parishes, fast-growing communities in Louisiana, north of New Orleans. Founded in 1935 as a telephone company dedicated to serving its rural customers, EATEL has grown to become a successful, 21st century telecommunications company, delivering IP network services to nearly 20,000 residential and business subscribers.
How does EATEL compete against larger Telcos? The company has built a reputation for reliable service and excellent support. With its dedicated support staff and a state-of-the-art, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network, the company continues to meet and exceed the expectations of its growing subscriber base.
Of course, keeping IP subscribers up and running requires an astute customer support organization that can troubleshoot problems quickly, even when working with non-technical customers. Harris Miller, Manager of Engineering at EATEL, has been evaluating management and support solutions that provided greater visibility into network status and activity of subscribers. To help this effort, EATEL’s customer support and network engineering teams find and fix problems as quickly as possible.
“For two or three years, we were actively seeking a solution that would give us visibility down to the individual subscriber,” Miller says. “We tried out some deep-packet inspection products, but found that they failed to deliver on what they promised. They tended to provide tip-of-the-iceberg information like lists of top talkers, rather than the subscriber-specific information we were looking for. Also, they required a high level of technical expertise. I could never imagine rolling out deep-packet inspection products to our customer support representatives (CSRs).”
“As soon as we saw the Xangati solution, we were immediately struck by the value of the product. We were benefiting from the product as soon as we began using it during the evaluation phase. The rewards were obvious right away. The product is so easy to use and its user interface is so intuitive. We knew right away that we wanted the product.”
Enter Xangati
The Xangati Rapid Problem Identification (RPI) solution enables customer support and network engineers to gain live and historical visibility into subscriber activity, and to quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve problems occurring on IP networks. Running on an easy-to-install appliance, the Xangati solution auto-discovers and maps identity for all network topologies, major applications, servers on the service providers’ network, as well as all the individual subscribers. Xangati builds behavioral profiles for all these components, including the subscribers, and continuously compares real-time activity against these profiles. When significant behavior changes occur—such as a traffic spike caused by a worm or a spambot—the system generates a problem alert that makes it incredibly easy for the operations team to then resolve the issue. By rapidly identifying problems, the Xangati RPI solution puts customer support and network operations teams in position to deliver highly responsive customer support. Engineers can take action, in many cases, before customers even realize there’s a problem.
EATEL began using the Xangati RPI solution on a trial basis in November 2007. The system proved effective immediately; for example, on the second day of the product trial, the network operations team was trialing customer support calls leveraging the Xangati user interface. On those calls, EATEL could already see the potential for dramatically shrinking their customer support call times. Given the rapid time to demonstrated value, EATEL purchased the Xangati system in December.
The Xangati RPI solution provides EATEL with many benefits, including some that Miller wasn’t even looking for. For example, the live analysis of subscriber and network activity is helping them with everything from troubleshooting customer problems to thwarting security attacks to capacity planning.
Diagnosing Subscriber Network Performance Problems
“We get a lot of inquiries about network performance from our DSL or FTTH customers,” Miller says. “These can be some of the most difficult calls to deal with, because it’s not simply answering a yes or no question like, ‘Is the network up?’. To find out why a network connection might be slow, we often have to escalate the call to a senior network engineer, which increased our support costs for the call. Xangati enables our CSRs to get answers right away, without escalating the call to an expert.”
Miller describes the time-consuming work that went into answering a customer’s question, before EATEL began using Xangati. “Before Xangati, we would do our best to diagnose performance problems, whether real or perceived, over the phone. Sometimes we would connect remotely to a customer’s computer to identify which application was consuming the subscriber’s bandwidth. Quite often we would have to dispatch a technician to the customer’s site, isolate the home network and their computers, and prove to them that the network connection was working properly and was able to burst up to the advertised speeds. But that, unfortunately, was not always satisfactory to the customer, because we were able to tell them it was not us. And we couldn’t tell them what inside their home was causing the problem. Even onsite, we didn’t have much visibility, other than by going room to room and isolating each computer, which was time-consuming and expensive for us, and frustrating for the customer. Having Xangati in place prevents truck rolls, and it’s ultimately more effective in identifying the problem.”
Using Xangati, EATEL customer support engineers can see exactly which applications are running and what effect they’re having on a customer network’s connection. They can determine the health of a subscriber’s home network overall—and let a customer know when a virus, worm, or spambot is running amok.
As a result of the visibility that Xangati provides, EATEL’s support engineers can resolve problems more quickly, and customers can be confident that they’re getting all the network bandwidth they’re paying for. Some customer support calls that used to last up to 30 minutes now consume only a fraction of that time. Thanks to Xangati, EATEL’s customer support team has been able to reduce the average time spent on “network performance” related calls by 25%.
Thwarting Security Attacks and Keeping Servers Safe
Customers like EATEL who buy the Xangati solution to solve a particular problem, such as customer support, find that the visibility provided by Xangati has many unexpected uses and benefits. One area where Xangati has pleasantly surprised EATEL is security.
EATEL’s network engineers use the Xangati RPI solution to detect and characterize security threats, enabling EATEL to take defensive action as soon as an attack begins.
Miller explains: “On two occasions, Xangati proactively notified us that email servers were experiencing performance problems. We used Xangati to find the IP address that was attacking us. Once we had the address, we entered it into the firewall and blocked the attack. Traditionally, one or more of the servers will actually fail before we’re able to able to identify the source of an attack and take action. Hunting through server log files can take hours. The Xangati RPI solution reduces that time to minutes. Our servers stayed up, and our customers didn’t suffer any downtime.”
“We’ve also used Xangati at the core of our network to identify spammers or virus-infected machines, or to troubleshoot other problems,” Miller says. “We can look back at what was happening at a specific time after we’ve had a problem, so we can prepare for the next time.”
Visibility into Customer Interests and Trends
The Xangati RPI solution is also giving EATEL’s marketing department new insight into what customers want.
“We’re able to look at bandwidth usage patterns and see what types of applications are popular with users,” says Tony Dubois, the Manager of Products and Development. “For example, Xangati is giving us useful aggregate data about applications such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. This gives us new ideas about what we might offer customers, and how we should best tier our product offerings. Eventually, we’d like to be even more proactive at the individual customer level. Xangati will help us with that goal.”
Miller adds that the Xangati RPI solution is helping EATEL ensure that it’s adding sufficient bandwidth
to stay ahead of customer needs. “We want to stay ahead of the curve, and Xangati is definitely helping
us there.”
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