The company provides many employee services and productivity applications using a thin client architecture, therefore the availability and performance of datacenter servers supporting those services and applications is critical to employee productivity.  For this reason, support staff required a solution able to detect service problems well before they negatively impact response times experienced by employees.  In addition, different applications and services were supported by different technical experts, who each needed access to monitored information without extensive solution training. 

Solution evaluators were surprised that Longitude’s breadth and depth of monitoring was comparable to their existing enterprise management solution, yet was offered at a fraction of the cost.  Longitude was installed and pointed at the relevant servers within a few minutes.  By the following day, staff completely abandoned the enterprise management solution. 

“The web interface is easy enough to allow [anyone] to look at the state of systems.”

Ease of solution customization was also key to Longitude’s success.  Support staff could easily create specific combinations of technology metrics to create key performance indicators for particular applications.  Staff could also use Longitude’s historical analysis of workload data to adjust the default thresholds in a few minutes as they responded to alerts without having to create specific scripts. 

Within two weeks the benefits were apparent. The number of problems identified by support staff before user complaints started leapfrogged from the 20-40% range to the 70-90% range.  In addition, service problems that used to take several days to resolve are being rectified within hours.