Tight budgets at this community college meant IT staff was using freeware utilities to manage the datacenter. However, performance problems were making the college’s online services unusable, 60-80% of the applications were missing their service level agreement (SLA) targets.  IT needed a sophisticated management solution that was also cost effective.  During the selection process, the staff was surprised at the range of features available at Longitude’s price-point, including depth of monitoring, scalability to cover their entire environment, SLA reporting, and real-time dashboard capable of displaying metrics from any combination of infrastructure.

Ease of deployment and administration was also a significant benefit.  Staff was able to install the solution, define technical and business service level agreements, set relevant thresholds based on collected workload data, specify event correlation and automated actions, and customize dashboards to simplify troubleshooting within a few days of purchase.  Within two weeks, staff reported noticeably faster mean-time-to-repair problems, a lower percentage of applications missing their SLA targets, and fewer service issue complaints.

With the service performance issues stabilized, IT could focus on bringing more applications and infrastructure under control of the management solution and improve their staff-to-server ratios.  This meant creating new SLAs for the applications, determining thresholds that provide early warning of problems, and creating new dashboard views.  Yet Longitude’s intuitive interface and out-of-the-box templates dramatically simplified these tasks, allowing the existing staff to expand their responsibilities without sacrificing the performance of existing services.