The situation
A business was having trouble getting to its network resources. Nothing obvious pointed to the cause, so I watched the traffic for a few hours to see what was actually happening. The bottleneck was streaming services eating the bandwidth.
What I did
The easy fix would have been to block streaming, but the staff were clear they wanted to keep it (it made for a better working day), and the manager agreed. So rather than take it away, I used QoS to put it in its place: I prioritized streaming lower, so the file transfers and network resources people needed for their work went first, and left streaming to use what was left.
The result
Business traffic got the priority it needed, and the staff kept the streaming they wanted. It's the kind of problem that's really two problems at once, a Layer 4 one and a people one. I diagnosed the technical side with real traffic data, respected what the people actually wanted, got the manager's call on it, and enforced that decision with QoS.