Army DOIM chooses NetScout Systems to Solve Long

The network team opened a ticket with
the service provider. After a few days
of investigation, the service provider
determined that it was not actually a
problem with the DNS server. More
digging revealed a firewall along the
path was that configured to do an IDS
function called “Deep Inspection”. The
firewall was identifying traffic from
SUCCESS STORIES | GOVERNMENT
Picatinny’s DNS servers as being
“malicious” and was configured to drop
traffic matching that signature. As a
result, all DNS requests from the DNS
Servers ended up in the bit bucket.
Once the setting was changed, requestresponse
traffic went back to a one-toone
ratio (See Figure 1).
Figure 1. The two nGenius Performance Manager screen captures above show packet rates on
the link to/from the DNS server before and after the problem with the firewall was identified and
corrected. The before screenshot (left) shows packet request rates (blue) nearly double that of the
responses (yellow) while the after screenshot (right) shows a more equal distribution.
Figure 2. Server Distribution charts showed the SAP servers as the most active by a factor of four.
Figure 3. Error distribution charts showed that the SAP server was experiencing an abnormally high
number of Server to Client Resets (SC-Resets).
Diagnosing Multiple SAP
Performance Issues
Users of an SAP application were
reporting poor performance and
occasional application failures of
the type “page cannot be displayed”.
The network team confirmed the
slow performance by reviewing the
Application Response Time graphs
within nGenius Performance Manager
and also determined that the SAP server
was the most heavily utilized server
within Picatinny’s DMZ, with more than
four times the users of any other server.
Additional investigation also revealed
that there were 170,000 failed
responses to a backend SAP Server
from the DMZ (See Figure 2) and an
enormous number of Server to Client
(SC) resets (See Figure 3). By taking
a packet capture, the team was able
to determine that SAP was using the
wrong web server configuration file.
The team then used nGenius
Performance Manager to generate
an ad-hoc report and emailed it to the
application group who quickly fixed the
configuration file thereby resolving the
performance issues.
The nGenius Solution also helped
uncover a load balancer configuration
issue that was slowing SAP
performance. Now that the issue has
been diagnosed, the SAP application
support team is close to resolving the
problem.
“The nGenius Solution gave us
the proof we needed to remove
the onus from the network team
and put it back on the application
team.”
Senior Network Engineer,
Army Contractor
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