Successful Remote Manufacturing operations rely on Network Visibility and Device Monitoring - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India & SAARC, NETSCOUT
For organisations in the manufacturing sector, back in the pre-pandemic era, shopfloor visibility was easily achieved through the on-premises network monitoring. However, with the onset of the pandemic and the lockdown that followed, hybrid-workforce came into play. Although remote working for the manufacturing industry is not viable, there are some aspects of a hybrid work strategy, such as managing schedules, automating shop floor processes among others.
Many a time, remote working blind spots could occur where challenges with continuous monitoring and visibility of the operations exist. Teams are then left in the dark on certain organisational risks that could be affecting the operations health.
Captured here is the example of a large manufacturer of a highly specialised technology for government and commercial customers. As this organisation is committed to provide innovative technology solutions, it manages a vast R & D and business operations across close to 30 worldwide locations. The manufacturer prioritises performance integrity and security of site operations with a business continuity plan put in place at all manufacturing locations. With the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing, the organisation successfully transitioned to a hybrid model. In this new model, a mix of WFH and on-premises employees assured uninterrupted production and supply chain management activities. This arrangement was crucial for a specialised manufacturing environment such as this, where maintaining infrastructure operations integrity is a top priority.
Their operations environment was geographically diverse with the network supporting many primary branch office locations and remote sites where the execution of the organisation’s strategic innovations took place. The network environment relied on multi-vendor router and switches and the VMware virtual servers that were recently introduced. Their technology environment included multi-vendor Unified Monitoring and Netflow Monitoring tools to assess network and remote site performance.
However, there were several periodic internal requests to the IT team to refresh their monitoring solution. The Network Engineering, Compute and Storage teams wanted to enhance their abilities to ensure good health of manufacturing operations. They wanted improved visibility into their remote environments with WAN utilisation and NetFlow traffic as well as comprehensive monitoring of the devices operating in these locations. This meant there was a need to improve the current-day visualisation and monitoring of mission-critical applications and devices running in infrastructures outside the organisation’s primary data centre locations.
NETSCOUT configured a single-vendor solution for network visibility, device monitoring and synthetic testing.
Network Traffic visibility
The software based nGenius ONE Service Assurance platform provided vendor-neutral visibility into all flow data across their remote locations. It also gave real-time performance snap-shots into the NetFlow traffic via service Dashboard views and Service Monitoring. The NetFlow and J-Flow meta data from routers and switches operating in remote environment was went to NETSCOUT nGenius Collectors. Thus, nGeniusONE presented intelligence to IT operations regarding link-level statistics, protocols and applications by utlisation, top talkers and conversations by source and destination IP addresses. NetFlow volumes, drop events and IPFIX packet counts were captured too. These are vital to the organisation’s improved device monitoring operations as well as understanding utilisation at the branch locations for informed capacity planning.
Device monitoring and synthetic testing
The virtual NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE infrastructure monitoring appliance used nPoint hardware sensors installed at high-value remote offices to provide IT Operations with a solution to assess remote user access experience with applications and services. Using nPoint Business Transaction Test results deployed in nGeniusPULSE, IT has refined their understanding of VMware virtual server performance and remote network connectivity. Drilldowns from nGeniusPULSE Sites Overview and Business Services Overview dashboard views enabled IT Operations to access specific synthetic test results to advance troubleshooting into potential causes of disruptive issues.
The manufacturer has now reduced instances of potential disruptions in product delivery, regulatory compliance, customer satisfaction, revenue, and brand reputation with NETSCOUT’s single-vendor technology and managed service solution.