The Company
One of the largest care delivery and health plan administration companies in the USA, the company is committed to helping millions of its members achieve their best health. It always seeks to improve health, well-being, while lowering costs for their customers, and is therefore always striving to optimize every portion of their operations to improve customer satisfaction and provide world class services.
Underpinning the ability to achieve such objectives is the IT infrastructure that connects all aspects of Company’s business that serves its customers and operations. Paramount to the Company’s success is the ability to control, optimize, shape, and extend its observability data. This provides the company with the flexibility that’s necessary to achieve greater serviceability with their log and telemetry data. Company can make the right decisions at the right time, and with swift and intentional determination.
The Challenge
Company had deployed a competing UDP packet broker solution into their environment. Challenges it faced due to their network growth and complexity, and increased log volume included:
- Log volume outpaced the throughput that their existing solution could handle.
- Unknown SNMP trap storms were causing network congestion and overloading the network management applications.
- Managing and implementing rule changes on their existing log management solution became too cumbersome, which required duplicating configuration changes across many devices that shared the same configuration.
- Log and telemetry data were dropped silently without notification to Company’s operations teams.
- Overall poor visibility into the data pipelines through their existing log management solution.
The Solution
PacketRanger is a simple, affordable, high availability solution to aggregate telemetry and log data allowing enterprises to control which data is ingested by each of their management systems and filtering out or re-directing low value data. Advanced filtering and forwarding capabilities provide the necessary flexibility to eliminate unneeded events, reducing data pipeline congestion. PacketRanger’s
statistical analysis offers visibility into data pipelines which drives better decision making on managing the data pipeline, and simplify efforts related to troubleshooting and performance tuning.
Company configured their existing log replication solution to bifurcate all log and telemetry data to pair of redundant PacketRangers. This production network proof-of-concept (PoC) provided the requisite continuity in preserving their observability data, aggregating key network metrics, and delivering log and telemetry data to numerous downstream management applications. Company could then make a direct comparison of Tavve’s PacketRanger against their existing solution using production log data and volumes.
Figure 1 – Proof-of-Concept (PoC)
After successfully proving the capabilities of Tavve’s PacketRanger, Company moved into the second phase of the production PoC and deployed a pair of PacketRangers concurrently alongside their existing log replication solution to expand observability into their network. A critical requirement for the PoC was to evaluate PacketRanger’s Statistical Analysis that could help the company determine if their existing solution was dropping data.
To achieve this, a load balancer distributed the log data between Tavve’s PacketRangers and Company’s existing log management solution. PacketRanger immediately confirmed UDP traffic loss previously unknown to Company. Additionally, PacketRanger’s Statistical Analysis and Reporting identified several source devices causing SNMP trap storms, which enabled Company to take swift corrective action.
The Result
After a seamless transition leveraging PacketRanger’s drop-in features, Tavve was able to help the company easily identify traffic loss, increase visibility into their observability pipeline, decrease the complexity of configuration mangement, and improve their overall telemetry data and log management strategy.
“We are using PacketRanger Statistical Analysis capabilities daily. It sets PacketRanger apart from other UDP traffic brokers. It takes us less than 10 seconds to answer incoming questions because of the ease by which the information is presented. Tavve will be our packet handlers for the foreseeable future.”
-Senior Systems Engineer, Company
Learnings
As the upsurge in network observability data continues, it is critical to have the right tools in place to monitor growth and confirm that data pipelines are being properly managed and consumed without data loss. Company’s network operations team has the confidence that Tavve’s PacketRanger will provide the necessary visibility and control into their log and telemetry data pipelines. Tavve’s PacketRanger ensures their IT infrastructure is functioning and performing properly, especially during their critical Open Enrollment periods. To learn more, contact us either via www.tavve.com or email at sales@tavve.com.