Public Utility Restores Critical Visibility into Customer and Operational Communications

A large regulated public utility responsible for power generation and distribution relied on mission-critical communications to serve customers and coordinate operations across multiple facilities. However, they lacked visibility in two essential areas: external customer call traffic during outages and peak-demand events, and internal communications between dams, substations, and control centers when responding to equipment or safety issues.

Challenges

For this large regional utility provider, voice communications are not just business tools, they’re operational lifelines. Every call has the potential to affect safety, compliance, or service reliability. From coordinating dam operations to responding to outages, communications uptime is mission-critical. However, their existing Cisco environment offered limited visibility into the health and performance of the system:

• Native Cisco tools lacked depth, offering only partial insight into call quality and trunk utilization.
• A previous third-party monitoring tool was compromised during a major cybersecurity incident and removed, leaving the utility effectively “blind” for nearly two years.
• Regulatory compliance pressures required documentation of uptime and service continuity that was difficult to produce.
• During peak events such as outages, teams struggled to determine whether calls were completing, dropping, or queuing due to congestion.

They needed a secure, centralized solution that could unify performance visibility, help justify funding and renewals, and maintain compliance with industry oversight.

Solution

The organization selected Nectar to bring end-to-end observability across its Cisco voice infrastructure and remote operational sites. What set Nectar apart was its ability to provide visibility specifically designed for voice and collaboration systems and not just generic network monitoring. The platform aligned with the utility’s stringent security and regulatory requirements, giving them confidence that their monitoring tools would not introduce new risks.

The team gained a unified view of call quality, SIP trunk utilization, and endpoint performance in a single dashboard, making it far easier to understand what was happening across multiple facilities. Instead of reacting to problems after they affected users or operations, Nectar enabled proactive diagnostics so the utility could identify early warning signs and resolve issues before they escalated. with dashboards and reporting tailored for both technical teams and leadership. This ensured that everyone from engineering to executive stakeholders, could easily access the health, performance, and reliability insights they needed.

Unified Visibility Across Mission-Critical Voice Systems

Operations teams now have continuous, end-to-end insight into voice performance across all generation sites and substations. Real-time dashboards highlight trunk utilization, call-quality metrics, and site connectivity, giving leaders the visibility they need to ensure reliability.

Proactive Performance Management & Compliance Readiness

Nectar’s analytics and alerting allow teams to detect degradation early, act before outages escalate, and easily report performance data to internal stakeholders and federal regulators. Automated reports validate uptime, call completion rates, and service continuity.

Simplified Toolset & Vendor Accountability

By consolidating multiple monitoring tools into a single observability platform, the utility reduced operational overhead, improved efficiency, and gained objective performance data that holds partners and carriers accountable.

“Cisco builds a great phone system—they just don’t build great monitoring tools. Nectar fills that gap perfectly.”