Blue Cross Blue Shield spots symptoms before network, voice apps get sick

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

The enterprise network systems department at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) can't spend the majority of its time troubleshooting network, application and VoIP performance issues.

That's why Mark Noonan, senior manager of the group, says NetScout's nGenius Performance Manager and nGenius K2 add-on application are put to work in three departments across the organization that manages three data centers in Massachusetts. For one, the network and application performance management software enabled BCBSMA to successfully roll out 1,200 Avaya nodes in the Hingham data center.

"NetScout monitors anything related to voice quality - jitter, latency - and those statistics helped us monitor building that network about a year ago," Noonan explains.

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The enterprise network systems department at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) can't spend the majority of its time troubleshooting network, application and VoIP performance issues.

That's why Mark Noonan, senior manager of the group, says NetScout's nGenius Performance Manager and nGenius K2 add-on application are put to work in three departments across the organization that manages three data centers in Massachusetts. For one, the network and application performance management software enabled BCBSMA to successfully roll out 1,200 Avaya nodes in the Hingham data center.

"NetScout monitors anything related to voice quality - jitter, latency - and those statistics helped us monitor building that network about a year ago," Noonan explains.

But BCBSMA doesn't limit the NetScout technology to monitoring voice. The software is also a staple tool for the network and security teams. The former group uses it to spot applications' bandwidth consumption and the latter to get an idea of the state of the network during security events.

"The security team has access to all the same graphs that the network and the voice teams do for their specific segments of the network," he explains. "The tool really helps them get additional information."

For network events, nGenius reduces troubleshooting times - and headaches, according to Noonan. "It serves as a great tool to make the time our engineers spend troubleshooting more efficient," he says. "Without it, troubleshooting would be a nightmare."

And he says NetScout went a step further with its nGenius K2 application, which helps detect problems and provide an early warning system. K2 is installed on the same server as nGenius Performance Manager and uses information collected by probes throughout the environment. For instance, the company's Web-based applications could be approaching a slowdown and K2 will alert Noonan and team to this potential service degradation.

"The application is good at notifying us when applications aren't hitting the response time thresholds we have set," he says (Compare Application Performance Monitoring products).

Noonan hasn't yet seen the effects of NetScout's acquisition of Network General, but he expects the transition to be "seamless." Still he says NetScout could improve upon its nGenius product set by upgrading the security features in the technology. With the technology installed in-line, he says BCBSMA could benefit from more protection.

"Security enhancements such as an IPS [intrusion-prevention system] engine would help us consolidate tools and offer us some operational cost savings," Noonan says (Compare IPS products).

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.