With more than 4,500 sites and over 63,000 network users, gaining visibility and troubleshooting such a massive network is a tall task. The organization, a Fortune 200 telecom provider, uses NetBrain as a go-to source for visibility, troubleshooting and to help maintain its large and expanding global network.
We sat down with the company’s Director of Network, IT and Security to discuss the value that NetBrain provides and how to justify the ROI. He was joined by a Senior Systems Engineer responsible for day-to-day network operations.
Visibility and Knowledge Sharing
“With a company of our size, we have too much network and not enough engineers to know it by heart,” said the Director.
Given the complexity and size of the network, naturally, visibility has long been a challenge for the organization. Using manual documentation tools and traditional knowledge-sharing processes was leaving the team with a lack of visibility and inefficient transfer of knowledge and collaboration. Now, through NetBrain, engineers are using Dynamic Network Maps to gain immediate network knowledge, ensuring that every site has the right information to troubleshoot a network issue.
According the Director, “Even for small portions of the network, being able to dynamically map in minutes instead of hours has helped us save time and spend our time more efficiently.”
Troubleshooting
NetBrain has become the go-to source for troubleshooting in this organization. The Director said, “Anytime a manager comes to me with an undefined problem, the first question I ask is ‘What does NetBrain say?’”
For example, at a recent site in Virginia a piece of the network was no longer responding and the network team needed to know which tree connections were broken. It was a critical problem, as this network connected to outside vendors and partners and any extended outage could be catastrophic. One of the circuits had stopped working, leaving other small circuits isolated resulting in the outage. Through NetBrain, the network team identified every site, and it was a simple fix to get everything back up and running in a very short time, something that could have taken them many hours or days.
Justifying an ROI and Site Validation
For the Director, measuring a return on investment was a simple math problem. By looking at the number of engineers on his team and their assigned projects and troubleshooting hours, he was able to estimate an expected time savings by using NetBrain. Once he saw the total operation savings per year, it was an easy decision. One specific project that he called out was with the team that needed to validate over 1,200 sites and he estimated at least an hour savings for each specific site by using NetBrain.
It was a pleasure to sit down with the Director and see the positive impact that NetBrain is making on the organization. We truly appreciate his time and this partnership.