Case Study: Natural Gas and Electrical Power Company achieves Five 9's AMI availability with NETSCOUT

Assuring Quality Performance of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)

A large North American natural gas and electric utility serving nearly half the U.S. states and parts of Canada was rolling out an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for over 3 million smart meters to enable detailed billing, customer access to usage data, and faster outage detection. Before production rollout they needed to validate AMI performance, ensure proactive alerts and rapid troubleshooting, and guarantee high availability to meet strict SLAs and regulatory reporting requirements.

The company deployed NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE service assurance suite (nGenius for Flows), InfiniStreamNG appliances, flow collectors and a Packet Flow Switch to support pre‑production testing and production monitoring. The solution instantly detected meter communication losses, generated proactive alarms, enabled rapid re‑meshing of gateway communications, and helped maintain a Five‑9s (99.999%) SLA—improving customer service, ensuring accurate billing and outage notification, and costing less than 0.5% of the overall AMI project.