Ameren Corp. has deployed NetQoS Inc.'s SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer to monitor and enhance application delivery over its wide-area network (WAN) supporting 9300 employees. Headquartered in St. Louis, Ameren provides energy services to approximately 2.3 million electric customers and more than 900,000 natural gas customers across nearly 64,000 square miles in Illinois and Missouri.
"Within days of deployment, we found both NetQoS SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer extremely useful in giving us visibility into all network traffic and helping us solve some critical network and application performance issues," said George Schindler, Ameren's supervising engineer of network operations. "With NetQoS, we can better respond to network and application performance problems--even before end users are impacted--and plan for network growth and trending, especially as we roll the products out to our operations and engineering groups."
Ameren chose NetQoS SuperAgent to improve the end user experience when accessing key applications, including its work management application for power plant personnel, customer service applications for call centers and mobile support, and customer facing Web sites. SuperAgent measures and analyzes application response times for all user transactions, compares response times against intelligent baselines, and then automatically investigates the cause of problems. SuperAgent isolates performance problems to the application, network, or server, enabling rapid troubleshooting of performance bottlenecks.
Ameren selected NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to gain visibility into hundreds of WAN interfaces and understand how application traffic is affecting network performance. By knowing which applications and users consume bandwidth, Ameren can make more timely and cost-effective decisions regarding network troubleshooting and capacity planning. ReporterAnalyzer is designed to handle the volume of flow data typical in the world's largest networks, providing real-time visibility into enterprise-wide network traffic and access to more than a year's worth of data.
"Whether it's a bird's eye view of the network or analysis of a specific link, NetQoS SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer help to streamline troubleshooting and capacity planning for companies like Ameren that depend more and more on the WAN for optimal application delivery," said Joel Trammell, NetQoS CEO.
NetQoS SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer are modules of the NetQoS Performance Center, a Web-based management portal that integrates data from NetQoS' products in customized views to help enterprises be more effective in capacity planning, troubleshooting, and service level management.
