Power plants for generation and transmission, substations for distribution, and sales and support offices are among the variety of facilities where electric power and utilities companies employ skilled personnel. Regardless of the actual location, a quality user experience is necessary for maintaining safe, continuous power availability to their residential and business customers.

Who’s Keeping the Lights On?

The electric utility market is led by a couple hundred major Global 1000 corporations that have several things in common. They have market capitalizations in the multibillions of dollars (or equivalent), provide services to tens of millions of customers, employ thousands of people and contractors, and support services in multiple countries.

Utilities also depend on a highly distributed infrastructure of power plants, substations, power generation sites, headquarters, sales offices, and support facilities, as well as a mobile crew of service personnel. These utilities are innovating their business with clean energy initiatives in hydroelectric, wind, and solar, while continuing to support traditional power sources. Delivering service, investing in new technologies, and supporting customers through natural disasters all requires sophisticated, modern, high-speed networks to deliver the operational technology (OT) portion of the business.

There is a virtually incalculable amount of data transported throughout the many locations and devices used to help deliver power and services to consumers. They require constant, high-quality performance and user experience 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to maintain always-on power distribution.

Types of IT-related Utility Issues and What’s at Stake

Performance disruptions and outages impacting utility company locations, IT equipment, or software can have a tremendous impact on utility organizations. The issues power companies faced in the wake of the CrowdStrike-related outage became a teaching moment for their IT organizations.

Power and utility companies rely on geographic information systems (GISs) and utility services, a system that is critical to asset management, network planning, and emergency response. During the CrowdStrike-related outage, technical glitches in cloud and enterprise platforms for GIS impacted responsiveness, service delivery, and operational efficiency. In many utilities, IT teams recognized the overall vulnerability of their entire IT system due to this one incident.

The following shows some real-world IT-related issues that can occur in utility networks and what is at stake when they do.

• Issues in the modern, highly complex, interconnected grid operations systems with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and industrial control systems can result in grid power disruptions.
• Issues with upgrades to outdated infrastructure can occur, or a mix of newer and legacy equipment can create interoperability issues or poor response times that take longer to troubleshoot, impacting either the OT network or the customer business network.
• Software-related issues have been the source of several very public issues with customer service—sometimes overbilling customers, delaying bills, or even accidentally shutting off service.

Performing regular maintenance of IT services for the OT network or for the business portion of the network has the potential to result in an issue that requires troubleshooting to resolve.

• Wireless collection of customer electricity consumption may be delayed or misrouted.
• Problems in customer contact centers may affect the quality of conversations, cause dropped calls during transfers, or result in lengthy wait times for customers.
• Crew access to online documentation from the field may be slow, lengthening remote service calls.
• Services such as badge readers or VoIP phones at unmanned substations may be unavailable when crews arrive for periodic service maintenance, reducing productivity and increasing work schedules.

When Impacting the Bottom Line is Unacceptable

Regardless of the problem, there are ramifications for many of these situations that can influence the bottom line for the business.

• Power disruption to consumers means utility companies can’t bill for what customers don’t receive, resulting in revenue loss.
• Customers frustrated with service disruptions, improper or delayed billing, or poor user experience with the contact centers may choose competitive services—increasing customer churn and reducing revenue.
• Issues in either the OT or business networks may impact employee productivity, necessitating overtime to complete workloads, which increases costs.
• Inability to meet compliance and regulatory requirements for protecting the network and services may result in expensive fines as well as reputational damage, again altering the business bottom line.

Application and Network Issues Abound! What Can You Do?

No one is immune from “network and software glitches” in their environments. One thing IT teams seem to agree on is that problem identification, root cause analysis, and service restoration is complex and time-consuming. An actionable step that utility organizations can take to overcome the challenges and increase business resiliency is to evolve from a reactive stance to a proactive approach by adopting end-through-end observability.

End-Through-End Observability for Utilities

NETSCOUT’s nGenius solutions for observability are specifically targeted at utility company locations and will dramatically reduce mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to restore (MTTR) essential applications and services to utility employees in remote facilities, as well as throughout the overall network. See the impact it had on one NETSCOUT utility customer as the organization added observability to successfully troubleshoot and resolve persistent problems in its remote power plants, substations, and offices.

See the impact NETSCOUT’s nGenius solutions had on one NETSCOUT utility customer as the organization added observability to successfully troubleshoot and resolve persistent problems in its remote power plants, substations, and offices.