Challenge
The Leeds Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust provides specialist mental health and learning disability services to 572,000 adults, across 62 sites in the Leeds area which are connected by a complex, highly secure data network. Over this network run critical applications needed to support the Trust's data and telecommunications needs. This includes patient records, mobile communications, and increasingly, VoIP and video conferencing. Over 2,500 employees rely on these tools on a daily basis.
The Trust was suffering from the following network health challenges:
Solution
The Trust used Network Instruments® Observer Suite coupled with Advanced Expert Probes to automate large parts of the network management process and reduce the time spent troubleshooting by 20 percent. The organisation achieved a complete return on their investment within 24 months and eliminated all consulting costs. Additionally, alarms were set up to prevent future issues and enable immediate problem resolution.
Identifying the Symptoms
The data flowing across the Trust’s network is not onlysensitive, but vital to patient care. This meant the network team had to  immediately address the slow connectivity issues it was starting to experience between certain sites. But with no consistency to the connectivity problems, it was hard to identify the exact cause of the slowdown. From the team’s viewpoint it could be any combination of problems across their Citrix®, HTTP, SMTP or Microsoft® Directory services.
Trying to troubleshoot also opened up its own issues. It was a time-consuming process that forced the IT staff to focus on extinguishing immediate network fires rather than on issue prevention and long-term planning. |
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Hergy Galsinh, Network Manager for the Trust, and UK Netcom worked together to establish the best solution to the problem. They had looked at NetScout®Sniffer®, but it was Network Instruments’ Observer® that met their immediate troubleshooting needs and continued expansion goals for optimum network performance management.
Observer’s Diagnosis
Within 10 minutes of deploying Observer Suite and multiple Expert Probes the team was able to analyse network, application, and server behaviour and identify the cause of the network slowdown.
The Windows update server was identified as the primary culprit. Rather than sending out updates at off-peak hours, it was sending them via the main network during the busiest times of the day. The network witnessed significant bandwidth and contention issues when large files containing video or medical images were sent in parallel with key business applications.
Observer’s analysis not only located the potential problem but Observer’s online reports provided substantial backup. With this data at hand, the team reset the updates to occur during off-peak hours. To avoid future problems, alarms were set within Observer to notify the team of abnormalities as they arose rather than waiting for user complaints. Observer not only provided the team with an unparalleled view of network and application performance but also enabled them to set internal service level agreements.
With the connectivity problems solved, the Trust started using Observer for preventative purposes, anticipating issues and planning activities and implementations in context of network demands and trends.
Next Page
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About Leeds Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust |
The Trust provides specialist mental health and learning disability services to over 572,000 adults within the Leeds metropolitan boundary. Each day the organisation provides help to over 2,000 people.
Service users are at the heart of the organisation. The Trust constantly strives to provide the best possible care and support, working closely with related organisations to provide effective, accessible and modern mental health and learning disability services. Working in partnership with local communities, the Trust’s core purpose is to provide the best mental health services available to the people of Leeds.
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