Case Study: Large Western U.S. Electric Utility achieves safety, reliability, and NERC-CIP compliance with NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Large Western U.S. Electric Utility Relies on NETSCOUT Solution to Assure Safety, Reliability and Compliance

A large Western U.S. electric utility serving millions and using smart‑grid technology faced a critical challenge: ensuring real‑time GOOSE protocol and EMS performance between redundant data centers and multiple substations (latency above 19 ms could threaten grid safety) while meeting strict NERC‑CIP audit‑trail requirements — failures risk fines up to $1 million per day — and also assuring performance for enterprise business applications.

NETSCOUT deployed InfiniStream appliances, Fiber TAPs and the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to capture packet flows, measure uni‑directional GOOSE latency, and provide dashboards, dependency mapping and daily server/port reports. The solution enabled continuous monitoring across transmission and enterprise networks, provided the audit trails needed for NERC‑CIP compliance, sped detection and troubleshooting of GOOSE/EMS issues (significantly reducing MTTR), and delivered assurance for mission‑critical custom and off‑the‑shelf applications.