Full Network Visibility Across Complex Health Care Delivery System

Hospital Group Extends Network Monitoring Capabilities

As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more prevalent, more and more data is being circulated over the network. Ensuring that the network performs at an optimum level and can serve up business data quickly and reliably is an important goal. When the medical industry is involved; however, and lives could be at stake, achieving that outcome is essential. So, when a large healthcare service delivery system began feeling ill effects from its complex, heterogeneous network infrastructure, there was cause for concern.

Overseeing some two-dozen owned or affiliated hospitals and clinics, the organization was managing large data centers for its customers—supporting numerous physical and virtual networks, systems and applications. And while the organization had CA Application Delivery Analysis (ADA) and CA Application Performance Management (APM) in place to monitor application performance, they only had limited visibility into their complete network infrastructure. Application performance degraded as a result, and the IT team was unable to fully leverage these vital CA solutions to deliver a high quality user experience to their large medical staff.

The limited visibility was due to the fact that many applications were custom, commercial-off-the-shelf or thin-client applications that didn’t lend themselves to modern monitoring methods associated with Java™ and .Net environments. It also stemmed from the need to monitor ever-increasing volumes of network traffic. By partnering with Keysight, CA Technologies was able to craft an alternative approach that eliminated these blind spots and other limitations while providing a comprehensive and scalable network monitoring solution.

By delivering all required traffic from anywhere in the network to CA APM and CA ADA systems, the Keysight Vision ONE™ network packet broker enables 100 percent of network traffic to be monitored and analyzed. Organizations that take advantage of this partnership can quickly deploy monitoring solutions with full network visibility and easily scale them as needed to drive higher levels of service delivery and application performance.

Risks From Limited Visibility

Expanding its healthcare delivery system through acquisitions and the addition of new affiliates had led to this complex, heterogeneous infrastructure. And with network monitoring limited to only four access points per data center, IT lacked the visibility to understand what was happening across the entire network infrastructure.

Specifically, IT couldn’t monitor the network at each data center all the way down to the respective server and application tiers. And the existence of blind spots associated with the organization’s virtualized, or private cloud infrastructure meant IT needed more time and resources to isolate and triage performance problems. Further, these gaps in visibility impaired IT’s understanding of network changes on the performance of critical systems and applications since the team couldn’t assess all related interdependencies. The strain on network monitoring from increased network traffic also challenged the organization to deliver a good user experience to the medical community.