“Using VoIP as an example, we have been able to record and save calls made over the force’s network and can later review these for troubleshooting purposes, for analysis or to verify quality of service. Without the GigaStor this would not be possible and we potentially could have faced serious telephony issues.”
Deployment
Following consultancy by Open Reality, the combined Observer Suite and GigaStor solution was installed by in-house network technicians. The same team continues to maintain rolling upgrades and to perform general administration. Most recently it added a GigaStor for retrospective analysis and extra multi-instance probes for wide-spread monitoring.
According to Hill, “The system was simple to install.”
Policing Applications
South Yorkshire Police provides policing and protection to the community 24 hours a day. To support this, the organization needs every element of its operation to be functional at all times. As a result, the Observer / GigaStor platform has proven to be invaluable. From the moment of installation it has delivered real operational benefits, which cannot be measured in monetary terms.
“I can’t rate the application analysis tool enough,” said Hill. “We have the ability to store massive amounts of data and then review this using time-based analysis without having to recreate problems. This greatly reduces the mean time to resolution and the number and cost of man hours it would require to manually do this. In fact, without the GigaStor some faults would remain unidentified."
Managing Government and Internal Rollouts
In addition to monitoring existing behaviour, South Yorkshire Police is increasingly using Observer to plan new application deployments.
“Observer provides granular insight into the network—24 hours-a-day,” said Hill. “In addition to day-to-day monitoring and deep application analysis, it is also perfect for pre-planning the impact of new application roll-outs on network performance.” |
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The South Yorkshire Police network team is responsible for two types of application rollouts—those that are mandated by the government and central policing initiatives (including Criminal Records Bureau (CBR) checks and the Street Crime Initiative), and those driven internally to enable improvements in performance and operational cost savings.
For example, Observer was instrumental in helping provision VoIP phones to almost all South Yorkshire Police personnel. This enabled the removal of all fixed line telephony links.
According to Hill, “Without Observer I would have struggled with the installation and tuning of VoIP. It saved a lot of time in fault finding and enabled me to greatly reduce our mean time to resolution. On a day-to-day basis it is perfect for controlling jitter and enables us to pro-actively monitor call quality.”
Conclusion
The Network Instruments monitoring platform has developed over the last six years and will continue to do so as the needs of South Yorkshire Police evolve.
“The combined Observer Suite and GigaStor monitoring platform has enabled South Yorkshire Police to run and manage a highly resilient 90-site network,” said Hill. “I can’t rate it highly enough.”
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About South Yorkshire Police |
South Yorkshire Police protects Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. It employs over 5,500 staff comprising of more than 3,100 police officers, 245 special constables, 350 police community support officers (PCSOs) and support staff.
Working from 90 police stations, including 11 major sites and police headquarters in Sheffield, South Yorkshire Police personnel are connected to each other, to the national Criminal Justices Extranet (CJX) and to the general public via a complex wide area network.
Built, managed and maintained by the internal IT department, South Yorkshire Police is a technically advanced force which has embraced technology to make law enforcement more effective. This has also created easier two-way communication with the general public.
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