With Observer on a laptop with a wireless card, King’s staff was able to quickly locate the source of the dropped connections: a vendor, in demonstrating a product, was using an uncertified microwave, which interfered with the wireless signal in the area. The issue was immediately resolved, because the staff was able to proactively respond using Observer.

Acquiring a Complete Network History
In addition to handling performance issues with Observer, the IT staff uses the Network Instruments GigaStor for historical analysis and policy enforcement. The GigaStor appliance allows the hospital to store days, weeks, and months worth of packet-level data for comprehensive historical analysis. Using GigaStor’s unique time-based navigator, IT staff can quickly sort through massive amounts of traffic to find policy violations or anomalous traffic. Network administrators can even reassemble packet streams to recreate e-mails sent and received, web pages visited, IM sessions, and VoIP calls.

King often uses GigaStor to troubleshoot intermittent network problems. “GigaStor has saved me hours of time in troubleshooting,” said King. “Usually network problems will take several days before reaching us. And by that time we receive only vague details of the problem at best. During one occasion, a complaint of a network slowdown came through the CIO with little detail. We only knew there was a slowdown in e-mail, and that it happened last week. GigaStor and Observer’s Expert Analysis allowed us to quickly isolate and resolve routing and retransmission issues with the e-mail server. Without GigaStor, we could have spent hours trying to replicate the slowdown.”

In this case, GigaStor’s massive hard disk captured the problematic traffic, thus eliminating the time-consuming step of trying to recreate vaguely defined network problems.

“Network Instruments provides us with complete visibility into everything occurring on our network,” said King. “Visibility is absolutely critical for us to be able to quickly identify and troubleshoot any issue before it impacts our network performance. With so many healthcare applications being dependent upon the network to function, having it go down is not an option. Being without GigaStor and Observer Expert and trying to locate the cause of a problem would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack in the dark.”

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