Renowned manufacturer maximizes network efficiency with NetOp and Meraki
About the Company
A renowned diversified manufacturer with a global footprint, and offices worldwide, specializing in precision machining and precision tooling, delivers innovative manufacturing solutions that provide customers with a distinct competitive advantage.
Challenges Faced
As a global provider, their distributed enterprise network is a critical component of their business. Despite initial assessments indicating a relatively healthy network, the company encountered quality of experience (QoE) challenges, with specific users’ noting network degradation when using high bandwidth consuming applications.
“We faced several key users asking ‘Why is my Microsoft Teams video meeting running so slow?’’ Said the company’s Infrastructure Manager. “This was a particularly tricky ticket, as it wasn’t reproducible and only certain users faced issues, while the app was running smoothly for others, at the same time.”
The company started to investigate the answer to this question. They use one of the well-known network monitoring and management solutions, however, the source of the problem eluded their existing solution. They sought an smarter, possibly AI-based solution to delve deeper into the network infrastructure and pinpoint the root cause. Additionally, they wanted the solution to provide better visibility across their end to end LAN/WAN network, Wi-Fi troubleshooting and application SLA monitoring.
Complexities in Identifying Network Issues
The complexities surrounding the network issues were multifaceted. The company had to consider potential problems that might be the source. The immediate suspected culprit is typically the environment related to the user and its access point. However, many other options to consider include issues related to the application itself, internet provider issues, as well as network device malfunctions like switching and routing errors.
“Pinpointing the reason to that issue seems like searching a needle in a haystack”, the Company Infrastructure Manager noted.
The Meraki Advantage and the Need for NetOp
The company utilized Meraki access points, which had proven to be a reliable and robust network solution and highly manageable. However, it became more challenging to conduct end to end investigation across multiple devices having legacy devices from other network vendors in the mix to identify what is affecting productivity. While Meraki’s equipment and cloud management offered valuable benefits, a holistic solution like NetOp was required to uncover the root cause of the problems, across multiple device domains.
The Resolution with NetOp
Deploying NetOp’s AI-powered network monitoring and operations solution proved to be a game-changer for the company. The synergies between Meraki and NetOp enabled a comprehensive end to end view of the network, with NetOp serving as a powerful solution to pinpoint the root cause of the issue.
With NetOp’s capabilities, including performance level baselining for each network location, the company quickly identified the anomaly and the resolution, pointing to one of their legacy devices that had an unusual number of errors.
NetOp’s historical logging and comparison features allows NetOp to also identify future issues by comparing baselines and network behavior patterns.
Maximizing Network Health
NetOp.Cloud’s real-time Proactive Monitoring capabilities extended beyond just network metrics, incorporating both physical parameters and service layer parameters. This comprehensive monitoring approach allows the company to resolve permanent network issues and to continuously ensure the overall health of their network infrastructure.
Conclusion
By harnessing the strengths of Meraki access points and Meraki dashboard and augmenting them with NetOp’s AI-driven network monitoring and operations solution, the company achieved a highly synergistic network environment. The successful resolution of their network challenges showcased the power of combining innovative technologies. NetOp’s ability to unveil the root cause of issues that surpassed the capabilities of other tools highlighted the importance of using a comprehensive solution for network management and translated into a 50% increase in network performance in critical locations. The company continues to maintain a competitive edge and enhance their team’s productivity with the powerful combination of Meraki and NetOp.Cloud.