Vocera trusts LiveAction Omnipeek and Omnipliance to safeguard the operation of critical hospital communication networks
Contents
The Challenge
As Vocera’s clients began migrating to 802.11n and 802.11ac infrastructures, the company discovered that the new standards’ shorter (0.4 μs) guard interval created reporting inaccuracies such as partial or duplicate results in the company’s Wireshark solution. This meant that when a communication problem arose, it was difficult to pinpoint whether it came from the network in general, a misconfigured access point (AP), or a malfunctioning device. Having unreliable communications in these critical hospital environments was not an option for Vocera.
“Omnipliance and Omnipeek make network troubleshooting much simpler, helping IT solve problems faster and keep vital services running.”
– SAM MAUNTZ DIRECTOR, SOLUTION SUPPORT, VOCERA COMMUNICATIONS
The Solution
After evaluating LiveAction Omnipeek®, Vocera deployed the solution throughout its field service and R&D network teams. Field service staff received WLAN USB Capture Adapters and clients installed Omnipeek Remote Assistant (ORA), a desktop agent that captures packets locally for enhanced troubleshooting.
Vocera then installed LiveAction Omnipliance® WiFi at its headquarters to consolidate the data and enable more powerful analysis. This new found flexibility allowed network engineers to monitor, test, analyze, and troubleshoot full gigabit- speed 802.11n and 802.11ac traffic from 85 Cisco, Aruba, and Meru APs captured at 20 Mbps per AP on Omnipliance WiFi’s 8 TB of storage. Vocera’s engineers use the data to perform real time analytics or post-capture forensic searches — replaying and analyzing problems that are intermittent or difficult to diagnose.
LiveAction Solutions Help Vocera:
- Analyze, monitor, test, troubleshoot, and optimize mission-critical 802.11n and 802.11ac customer networks
- Provide field service engineers and clients easy-to-use tools to collect local network traffic
- Accelerate WLAN, VoIP, and VoFi troubleshooting using Omnipeek features including Expert Analysis
- Allow Vocera’s clients to focus on their core business — exceptional patient care
Benefits
“Omnipeek excels at troubleshooting problems like interference, dropped or duplicated packets, and roaming issues,” said Arturo Dominguez, staff network engineer at Vocera. “Even if the trace is encrypted we can recognize issues like a deauthentication event, one-way audio, or a multicast that isn’t working properly. Our technical support or field engineers can easily pinpoint issues because they have all of the information at their fingertips. In fact, they can drill down to a specific badge to see what it’s doing as it roams from one AP to another. In a hospital environment, this is a critical advantage.”
With Omnipeek and Omnipliance WiFi delivering these powerful and robust network performance features, Vocera’s clients can focus on their own area of expertise: providing the utmost care for their patients.
About Vocera
Vocera Communications, Inc. offers the most robust clinical communications system in healthcare. Installed in more than 1,300 organizations worldwide, Vocera delivers secure, integrated and intelligent communication solutions that enable care teams to collaborate more efficiently by delivering the right information, to the right person, on the right device, in the right location, at the right time. Vocera solutions provide hands-free voice communication, secure text messaging, patient engagement tools, and integrated clinical workflow with EHRs, nurse call systems and physiological monitors. These solutions help improve operational efficiency, quality of care, safety and satisfaction across the continuum of care. In addition to technology solutions, Vocera drives thought leadership and new standards in care to elevate patient, family, nurse and physician experiences via the company’s research collaborative, the Experience Innovation Network. Vocera is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices in San Francisco, Tennessee, Canada, India, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit www.vocera.com and @VoceraComm on Twitter.
About LiveAction®
LiveAction provides end-to-end visibility of network and application performance from a single pane of glass. We provide enterprises with confidence that the network is meeting business objectives, full network visibility for better decisions, and reduced cost to operate the network.
