Helsana invests in network health

Seeing the network beyond

As a leading Swiss health and accident insurer, Helsana must deliver consistently high-quality digital experiences for both members and employees. But as the organization expanded into public cloud and embraced remote work, network complexity increased—and performance became dependent on infrastructure beyond the team’s direct control.

Pinpointing the source of network or application performance issues became a major challenge. “It could take us up to an hour to isolate a problem and determine whether the fault originated within Helsana’s network, the SD-WAN provider, or SAP running in Microsoft Azure,” says Markus Schellenberg, Network Engineer at Helsana. The result was a familiar cycle of finger-pointing across providers, driving up mean time to resolution and disrupting user productivity.

Strengthening network visibility

To regain control across an increasingly distributed environment, Helsana turned to Cisco ThousandEyes. As an established Cisco customer—already leveraging Cisco ACI, SD-WAN, ISE, and Cisco collaboration tools—the addition of Cisco ThousandEyes extended visibility across the full digital experience, integrating seamlessly into the company’s existing architecture.

Helsana deployed Cisco ThousandEyes to monitor its entire extended network—from on-prem infrastructure to cloud and end-user environments. 

• Enterprise Agents embedded in Catalyst 9300 switches provide continuous, site-level visibility across 50 locations. 
• Endpoint Agents give deep insight into remote user experience, including device health and Wi-Fi performance. 
• Cloud Agents deliver persistent monitoring of internet paths, application availability, and services running in Microsoft Azure.

Rather than over-instrument every application, Helsana took a more strategic approach. The team defined a small set of targeted tests that act as proxies for overall system health, covering SD-WAN, core applications like SAP in Azure, web properties, and critical third-party services. “With these health checks, we can see the state of the whole network, internal and external. If there are no active alerts, we are generally confident that the extended network environment is healthy,” Schellenberg explains. “If there is an unexpected problem, we can set up new tests quickly to pinpoint the specific issue.”

Proactive problem resolution and stronger partnerships

Since deploying Cisco ThousandEyes, Helsana has dramatically accelerated its mean time to resolution (MTTR), troubleshooting problems 90% faster. “ThousandEyes not only shows which service is slow, it shows us where the actual trouble lies,” says Schellenberg. “The software recognizes issues such as delays, latency, packet loss, and jitter, and assigns the problem to the affected device.” The network team now routinely identifies and corrects issues before a trouble ticket is raised and then calls the help desk team to warn them before users even report the problem.

The team’s proactive approach has significantly decreased the overall volume of support tickets. With read access to Cisco ThousandEyes, the help desk team can now view data and resolve issues independently, further reducing demands on the network team. Other internal departments have also begun to recognize the benefits of Cisco ThousandEyes. Helsana’s Cloud Foundation team now routinely requests custom tests.

The Cisco ThousandEyes software has also reshaped how Helsana collaborates with external partners. In the past, partners hesitated to take responsibility for outages, forcing the team to provide detailed sniffer traces to prove where a fault originated. Today, the team can simply send a Cisco ThousandEyes snapshot, a point-in-time capture of monitoring data that encapsulates network, application, or endpoint performance results. “A partner can read the ThousandEyes snapshot and immediately understand where the problem is,” says Schellenberg. Any potential for finger-pointing is eliminated by identifying precisely where an issue resides, so they can more quickly understand and fix problems.

Preparing for an AI-driven future

The Helsana network team credits its work with a Cisco ThousandEyes Technical Account Manager (TAM) as a key factor in its ongoing success. The TAM acts as a proactive advisor, meeting with the team for 30 minutes every week to optimize platform settings, review tickets, and provide updates on the ThousandEyes product roadmap. Helsana values this service highly and plans to continue it long-term.

Having established the value of Cisco ThousandEyes, Helsana is planning to add some additional capabilities. Schellenberg plans to further roll out Cisco ThousandEyes Cloud Insights, which will provide traffic views, visualize cloud topology, and highlight cloud infrastructure changes in their Azure environment.

The team has also begun exploring the Cisco ThousandEyes AI Assistant, and Schellenberg is excited to harness its abilities to accurately validate existing alerts and provide predictive insights. “I think the AI Assistant will be able to make predictions like ‘There have been three errors on a particular leased line, you’re going to have a problem there within a month,’” he says. “This will allow us to be even more proactive.”

Schellenberg expects ThousandEyes to play a vital role as Helsana embraces an AI-driven future. The company recently set up its first three on-premises AI servers, with plans to invest heavily in data center network infrastructure to accommodate the increased bandwidth demands. As AI workloads come online, Cisco ThousandEyes will help the team efficiently monitor and manage the new performance requirements.

Whether its AI or something more mundane, the Helsana network team is confident that with Cisco ThousandEyes in its toolkit, they can handle whatever comes next. “As a network engineer, I now feel very comfortable that we can address almost any issue quickly,” says Schellenberg. “I would recommend this solution to any company faced with similar challenges. With ThousandEyes, you can know the unknown.”