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Cleveland Metroparks innovates with ease with full performance visibility
Operational situation
The Metroparks system is managed by a dedicated park staff that includes an IT team that connects and monitors 57 remote locations. These locations span numerous counties adjacent to Lake Erie in northern Ohio and provide a safe green space retreat for millions of visitors.
With technology, the Metroparks team manages a wide range of park services which include the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, eight golf courses, boating rentals, and a wide range of hiking, biking, cross-country skiing, horse rides, fishing and other services that maximize the year round use of the vibrant greenspaces spanning the Metroparks 18 reservations.
The IT team’s charter is to ensure that all of the interconnected remote park sites perform seamlessly to provide operational support and an exceptional park user experience. The Metroparks’ IT team needed to ensure that communications between all of the remote park sites operated smoothly and continuously during the park site’s operating hours.
But, Cleveland Metroparks’ innovation doesn’t stop there. The Metroparks team has implemented an initiative using virtual reality technology to provide an immersive park experience to individuals with health issues, disabilities, or who are otherwise unable to enjoy the park facilities.
According to Anthony Joy, Chief Information Officer for Cleveland Metroparks, “The virtual reality headsets will be placed at Nature Centers as an ADA accessibility feature so individuals who are unable to physically enjoy some of the trails can use the new digital experience.”
The technology used to provide this capability is complex and requires continuous performance monitoring to provide a satisfactory experience. The Metroparks team realized that to ensure the best user experience possible requires continuous performance monitoring and complete performance visibility to ensure that when degradations or disruptions arise, they can be resolved as rapidly as possible.
How Cleveland Metroparks applied Skylight
VoIP problem diagnosis: “During our Proof of Value for Skylight, we used it to detect and fix a sporadic Voice over IP issue that we were having difficulty isolating. Within minutes we were able to see low Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) provided by Skylight performance analytics to guide our investigation. It showed us that one network link was intermittently going bad and causing a large number of retransmissions which negatively impacted VoIP performance. Once we found the issue, we were able to completely remediate the problem in less than 30 minutes.”
Internet link performance degradation: “Skylight helped us investigate a serious degradation on one of our internet links. The degradation was impacting our network and numerous users were complaining that they were unable to access the internet. We began investigating with Skylight, discovered the network transactions impacting performance, and isolated the problem to a specific user who had initiated a large download and left it unattended while they did other things. We were able to rapidly resolve the issue and eliminate the degradation.”
Ticketing software performance problem isolation: “Recently, we upgraded the software we use for ticket transaction record keeping for the Zoo and several of our park venues. In the midst of the upgrade we encountered a number of odd issues related to registration and performance testing. We used Skylight to monitor the ticketing transactions to isolate the problems and were able to determine they were caused by issues with response time on the software vendor’s servers. We were able provide the vendor with factual, detailed transaction data and they were able to rapidly resolve the issues for us.”
Solution benefits
Since implementing Skylight performance monitoring, the Metroparks IT staff has been able to maintain exceptional performance during peak operational periods and for the innovative Metroparks virtual reality tour program.
The Cleveland Metroparks team has deployed Accedian Skylight to:
- Shorten resolution times while offering more precise and rapid reaction to network performance issues
- Accelerate the diagnosis and repair of performance degradations
- Isolate problems during application software upgrades
- Isolate and resolve VoIP problems
- Expand the scope of services and support to customers through the use of virtual reality
About Cleveland Metroparks
Cleveland Metroparks is an extensive park district with over 23,700 acres in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area. The Emerald Necklace, as it’s otherwise known, is comprised of eighteen reservations that encircle the city of Cleveland, following along some shores of Lake Erie and the region’s rivers and creeks. The Cleveland Metroparks system is open year-round to the public. It provides a wide range of services including the nationally acclaimed Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, over 300 miles of trails, eight lakefront parks, five nature centers, golf courses, restaurants, and marinas. It’s cherished by hikers, cyclists, runners, boaters, fishers, and nature enthusiasts of all kinds
"Skylight’s ability to show us complete application transaction performance allowed us to demonstrate to our partner that the problem was not occurring within our network. It enabled us to avoid the potential finger-pointing that can occur when you’re unable to see the performance for application services provided by a third party source."