Johnson Controls Dramatically Speeds Troubleshooting with NetScout's nGenius AFMon.

Reports 90 Percent Reduction in Troubleshooting Time as it Consolidates Networks Due to Acquisition

WESTFORD, Mass. -- NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT), the industry pacesetter for advanced network and service assurance solutions, today announced that NetScout's nGenius AFMon is being used to dramatically reduce troubleshooting times and smooth network transitions as Johnson Controls (www.johnsoncontrols.com), a global Fortune 100 company that creates smart environments where people live, work and travel, assimilates recently acquired companies.

Founded in 1885, Johnson Controls has headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and 136,000 employees in more than 1,000 locations across 125 countries. It recently acquired York International, a global supplier of heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC&R) equipment and services, picking up 10,000 new employees and dozens of new applications. Those employees and applications are in the process of being incorporated into Johnson Controls' existing MPLS network.

Any time new applications are added to a network, issues may emerge from contention for bandwidth to spikes in unknown traffic to poorly performing services due to the use of a new WAN topology like MPLS. When the new applications are added as part of the integration of the acquired company, the network team must maintain good performance for both existing employees and applications as well as for the new employees and applications. By combining deep-packet analysis and enterprise data monitoring into a single appliance specially designed to deliver high-performance and high-capacity monitoring, the nGenius AFMon has given Johnson Controls the breadth of evidence it needs to get to the bottom of tricky performance issues as these two networks become one.

For example, when staff at York reported slow network performance, nGenius AFMon enabled Steven Leventhal, Johnson Controls' senior network monitoring tools engineer with global responsibility, to look at the actual transactions and see that TCP send window and receive window sizes were misaligned. "nGenius AFMon showed us that York and Johnson Controls were on different versions of Windows and as a result, had dissimilar default buffer settings," says Leventhal. "That setting issue was causing the program to send smaller packets that would ping-pong back and forth. nGenius AFMon's bounce charts showed that the problem was adding 30 milliseconds per packet; if you multiply that by a thousand packets, that's substantial delay. The evidence from nGenius AFMon allowed us to make the appropriate changes. Once the applications were sending appropriate sized packets, performance improved dramatically."

NetScout's nGenius System was also able to help the network team rapidly restore service when York users began reporting that application time-outs were preventing them from posting necessary inventory changes. "nGenius AFMon showed that the site was getting swamped with broadcast traffic, causing a switch to drop packets," says Leventhal. "We were able to see that one switch sent the packet, but the next switch failed to pass it on to the routers--we were able to see precisely where packets were being dropped." A quick setting change rectified the situation, and enabled the end users to get their important inventory updates underway.

"NetScout's nGenius AFMon has dramatically sped up our troubleshooting process," says Leventhal. "Troubleshooting that used to take 20 minutes to do now takes only two minutes with the nGenius Solution."

Additionally, NetScout's nGenius Performance Management System has had an unexpected side-benefit: it has brought the network and applications teams closer together. "There has been a dramatic increase in the number of requests from people who want me to use nGenius Performance Manager to help them troubleshoot their applications," says Leventhal. "The situation has definitely evolved--where historically the process would be to rule out the network first, it has evolved into a collaborative process where we have visibility to troubleshoot all aspects of the network and applications traversing it. It could be anything from bad DNS lookups to TCP window sizing to issues with the way the applications themselves were written. There is definitely a new understanding and appreciation today."

About NetScout Systems

NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT) has been the industry pacesetter for advanced network and service assurance solutions for over a decade, and counts the world's largest enterprises, government agencies, and service providers among its customers. Enterprise and government IT organizations deploy NetScout's nGenius([R]) Performance Management System to increase service levels to their users by reducing or preventing service disruptions. Service providers depend on NetScout's proven IP performance management technology and expertise to protect the quality of their customers' experience with IP-based services. NetScout is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts and has offices worldwide. Further information is available at http://www.netscout.com.

(c)2007 NetScout Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. NetScout and the NetScout logo, nGenius, and Quantiva are registered trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc. The CDM logo, MasterCare, the MasterCare logo and Progressive Analytics are trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc. Other brands, product names and trademarks are property of their respective owners. NetScout reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to make changes at any time in its technical information and specifications, and service and support programs.