One of the many network management tools Bell Canada offers as an outsourced service is NetScout’s nGenius Performance Manager. nGenius is designed to help network managers drill down into their networks, monitor applications and figure out traffic patterns.
Bell not only sells nGenius as a product and service — the telco giant has also been using nGenius to monitor its own enterprise-class internal network since 2000.
Back in 2000, Bell Canada found itself making a lot of changes to its internal network. The telco giant had completed a number of significant upgrades to prepare for Y2K and needed a tool that would give the company a better view of its network traffic.
“If there were performance issues, slowdowns or problems we needed to be able to understand definitively what was going on in the network, so we could address the questions of the people who were responsible for the applications within Bell Canada,” says Ron Haag, director of network service and technical support with Bell. “We needed to know whether the problem was with the application or the network.”
Prior to installing nGenius, Bell had used several capacity management tools to monitor its Canada-wide network reaching 35,000 employees and several affiliate organizations. Those tools could show whether a link was having problems due to too much traffic, but Bell needed more information.
Bell looked at a number of other tools including Agilent’s NetMetrix and Cisco’s CiscoWorks 2000. Part of the reason Bell went with NetScout and nGenius was the customer support.
“We were looking for someone who was a little smaller and a little more flexible,” Haag says. “We know for a fact some of the things we wanted out of nGenius NetScout has put in there for us.”
nGenius relies on hardware-based probes to get its results. In Ontario, Bell uses 60 different types of probes, including Gigabit Ethernet, Ethernet and ATM.
“We tend to place the probes in points of aggregation so we can see the most we can,” Haag says. “We also have roving probes that we put in areas where we feel we need to monitor something — like a location using new applications, or where there’s been a change in the population, or where there’s an ongoing issue.”
When Bell installed nGenius in 2000 the product was still relatively new and the results weren’t perfect, Haag says.
“Bell’s network was, at the time, one of the largest using nGenius,” he notes. “As a result of that we overran certain table sizes within probes. We worked with NetScout to sort those things through.”
The product is now much more stable, Haag says. The interfaces are improved, the size of the historical databases is larger and reporting is more frequent.
With the nGenius probes in place, Bell is now able to determine what its baseline traffic looks like.
“We know how much Internet traffic we have and how much the major applications require,” Haag says. “We can use those baselines to determine if there’s a change. So for example we may have a group that decides to do some backup of their data centres during the day. We can pick up on that pretty quickly and we know who it is since we have the source and destination IP. We can be on the phone with them in 10 minutes and ask them to hold off on the backups until the traffic tails off after hours.”
Bell’s now looking at new options such as Flow Recorder, a part of the nGenius system that scans recorded network traffic to identify network or application problems.
“With Flow Recorder, if we have performance problems that we want to go back and have a look at that we weren’t actively looking at before, we can do that,” Haag explains.
nGenius worked well enough for Bell that the telco now sells nGenius both as a product and as a managed service.
Haag’s team is often called on to show potential clients what nGenius can offer. Interest in the product has been picking up, Haag notes.
“A year ago we were maybe asked for one or two, maybe three demonstrations in a year,” he says. “Now I’m getting three requests a month.”
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