Fighting Ghosts in the Plants: NETSCOUT & WWT for Persistent Observability and Data-Driven Decisions

This article was written and contributed by, NETSCOUT.

A Case for Leveraging NETSCOUT & WWT for Persistent Observability and Data-Driven Decision Making

The Challenge

Manufacturing companies invest in modernizing their facilities to realize the benefits of connected assets and digitization in pursuit of greater efficiency, lower costs, and higher output. The benefits of these pursuits also introduce risks in the form of latency, outages, and performance detriments that we refer to as "ghosts" in the system which cost manufacturers millions in lost production output, delayed shipping and quality impacts.

While many plant leaders tout 99% uptime, even 1% downtime has significant consequences:

• A major consumer appliance manufacturer reports $500 cost per minute of downtime.
• One supplier consistently missed delivery windows due to "IT issues" but despite meeting their SLA their customer went to seek alternative vendors.
• Another company's migration of a barcode system to the cloud caused a two-week mislabeling error, delaying shipments and triggering a $10M financial hit.
• A large plant suffered frequent disconnects between AGVs and critical systems, disrupting just-in-time operations and causing significant financial pain.
• A large automaker reports the cost of latency in the process is $10,000 per minute, with cars coming off the line every 86 seconds - these small delays are impactful and are reported daily to the C-Suite

Too often, frontline teams lack visibility and tools to diagnose the root cause. A common response? Reboot and hope the ghost disappears.  This response effectively kicks the can down the road because the focus is to get the production line moving again as fast as possible.  The issues are experienced again or consistently enough where bad habits and accepted downtime is worked around or additional processes are added to compensate for this behavior instead of actually addressing it.

The Root of the Problem

These persistent but inconsistent issues span three interconnected layers of plant operations:

1. The Edge – where data is ingested and processed at the plant connection to the cloud and or to co-lo. Edge can also be in the plant itself at the data source or process.

2. The Application Layer – increasingly virtualized and hybrid

3. The OT Environment – where machines, sensors, and systems execute production

As datacenters shrink and compute shifts to the edge, visibility into these three domains becomes essential. Any disruption, whether from cloud latency, virtual app errors, or OT system interference—can trigger cascading effects that impact revenue, customer relationships, and operational efficiency.

How IT Leaders Are Responding

Many manufacturing IT leaders are adopting Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices to:

• Ensure high uptime for MES, SCADA, and IoT systems
• Enable non-disruptive updates to critical applications
• Support predictive maintenance and autonomous operations
• Bridge IT, OT, and engineering silos
• Implement structured, measurable incident response

But to make SRE work, you need one critical enabler: persistent observability.

The Solution: NETSCOUT + WWT

NETSCOUT delivers persistent observability across all three plant domains—edge, application, and OT—by analyzing real-time packet data at a granular level:

• Smart Data at Scale – Real-time processing of physical and virtual traffic
• Root Cause Clarity – Pinpoint latency, retransmissions, and application errors
• Cross-Platform Correlation – Integrates with Splunk, ServiceNow, and cloud data lakes
• Actionable Intelligence – Enables automated or rapid incident response to changes, planned or unplanned
• Visualization – simple to access and understand the aggregated data in real time, with a historical perspective, and the ability to dive deep into the traffic behavioral analysis

Why NETSCOUT's Data is Unique

• Granular – Full-fidelity packet-level insight, not just summaries
• Contextual – Connects users, devices, apps, and services
• Defensible – Verifiable records suitable for legal or security review
• Independent – Requires no agents or logging configurations

WWT complements NETSCOUT by helping customers operationalize observability and align with their digital transformation goals:

• Build impactful Splunk dashboards based on SRE's "golden signals"
• Assess and document application and communication dependencies assets and services
• Guide AI and ML initiatives using verified, real-time data

WWT seeks to understand the client holistically to provide insights and recommendations associated with infrastructure, security, data and platforms and their impact on the client's people and processes.  These gained insights allow for focused challenges and objectives to be met while enabling an adaptive future state that can enable the Client's IT and OT to move faster and drive the business forward.

The Result

Together, NETSCOUT and WWT help manufacturers detect and eliminate the ghosts haunting their plants—before they disrupt production, damage customer trust, or impact revenue. Let's talk about how we can help your plants run smarter, faster, and more resilient.