NeuralStar delivers for the National Guard

Assuring The Network For First Responders

NeuralStar and Mississippi Army National Guard
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Mississippi Army National Guard (MSARNG) acquired NeuralStar to enhance performance and assure service for its 120 locations and forward-deployed units across the state.

With missions that can range from daily operations to crisis response and disaster relief, the management ConOps for MSARNG revolves around providing the necessary levels of visibility—in the field and through the command structure—to ensure reliability and control over a network comprised of a wide variety of devices, applications and services. In selecting NeuralStar, MSARNG’s goal was to empower its frontline network operators, regardless of their experience level, with the ability to see, understand and rapidly respond to any type of network event.

Just as important, any organization with such diverse, often simultaneous missions requires flexible management systems. NeuralStar’s “out-of-the-box adaptability” enables MSARNG to easily tailor everything from event definitions to filters, rules, workflows, reports, desktops and more to meet the individual needs of users up and down the command structure, across locations and mapped to discrete missions.

NeuralStar and Alabama Army National Guard
Similarly, the mission of the Alabama Army National Guard’s (ALARNG) network management system is to provide comprehensive availability and performance management for a critical network infrastructure of 103 sites and thousands of physical ports. With NeuralStar recently installed, ALARNG is outstripping previous expectations of those responsibilities, and discovering new ways to use its capabilities to ensure network availability, including ways to:

• Distinguish between network, server and application problems, since NeuralStar displays the equipment type, application or service affected on alarm information screens. Users filter alarms based on equipment classification as well as alarm type.

• Highlight network issues before users are affected with NeuralStar updating information at near real time speed and employing user-defined thresholds that anticipate potential problems before they occur.

• Filter data for maximum efficiency and responsiveness, using NeuralStar’s ability to filter alarms on more that 25 fields, including, alarm type, device type, location, status, customer, circuit and trouble ticket, as well as ten user-defined fields.

• Determine the true cause of network problems, since NeuralStar correlates incoming fault data from a variety of elements and protocols, then normalizes the data and correlates it against user-defined rules.

• Provide early warning of degrading performance, to protect from interruptions in service. NeuralStar users can detect increases in utilization, packet loss, discards and other essential metrics.