Early Adopter of Advanced Technology
South Yorkshire Police was an early adopter of proven technologies including Voice over IP, video conferencing and http-based systems specific to police practices. These applications run over a complex network infrastructure linked to two data centres.

As a result, South Yorkshire Police, one of the best technically supported forces in the country, has saved thousands of pounds in phone bills and site-to-site transport, and has enabled manpower resources to be focused almost entirely on the needs of the force and the public it serves.

Managing Network and Application Performance
Technology is not failsafe, especially as applications become more sophisticated and the need for jitter-free IP-based communications increases. To ensure the South Yorkshire Police network and its applications are available 24 hours-a-day, the IT team has deployed a highly effective, yet relatively low-cost, network and application monitoring platform.

This comprises of Network Instruments' Observer Suite, a large-scale capture GigaStor, six multi-instance probes and eight single-instance probes.

This set-up continually sniffs the network for faults and provides feedback and analysis highlighting areas where performance is impaired or where failures are likely to happen if left unaddressed. South Yorkshire Police also uses Network Instruments’ retrospective network analysis technology to investigate incidents days, weeks or months later, providing down-to-the-second reports on traffic and application activities before, during and after the problem occured. This makes it ideal for monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) and key performance indicators.

South Yorkshire Police worked closely with specialist IT consultancy, Open Reality. With the team at Open Reality, they provisioned a robust system that could provide a near real-time view of traffic patterns, thorough packet-level information and assist in proactive and reactive monitoring. Today the monitoring platform is relied on for 24/7 network assurance.

According to Adam Hill, network infrastructure architect at South Yorkshire Police, “The feature-rich set of analysis tools provided by Observer and GigaStor ensures that the raw information we acquire from our network probes is efficiently translated into actionable items. The main benefit that influenced our purchasing decision for Observer Suite was the integration of all components within a single package.”

To Catch a Thief
The Network Instruments solution supports two main operational aspects for South Yorkshire Police. First, the GigaStor is positioned to capture, analyse and conduct long-term trending on all traffic entering the main police data centre via 8 Gb links. This provides the ability to navigate to the exact moment a problem happened, and to see a detailed packet-level view of the occurrence. Second, the probes are positioned at all 12 major sites to monitor WAN traffic to and from the site. Network Instruments probe technology can also manage all Windows-based infrastructure, such as file and print servers.

Network Instruments probes are located at key points on the network—at the WAN link and data centre access points. Often the problems are localised so the probes are sufficient. If there is an issue across multiple areas then the Network Instruments GigaStor probe appliance looks back at performance patterns to highlight flashpoints.

According to Hill, “The ability to store large amounts of rolling data and then to have the ability to review this days, weeks and even months later is invaluable and is the only way we can guarantee network health."

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