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.

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.

IT staff were unable to proactively detect and manage service level problems.  User calls initiated their problem resolution processes, between 60-80% of the time.  To solve this problem, staff wanted a single monitoring solution to replace their point products. Longitude was selected for its breadth of monitoring capabilities and its ability to provide a mechanism to group key performance indicators from different technologies related to a particular service.  With Longitude in place, only 20-40% of service problems are identified through user calls.

Installation of the solution was completed within a few hours and was monitoring datacenter and SNMP devices immediately.  Tasks such as specifying the infrastructure to monitor, the thresholds, and the important technology service level agreements (SLAs) were customized ongoing as staff used the product.  Each task took only a few minutes to complete each time.  Within a month, IT staff was using the solution full time without reverting to their old tools. 

With no time for formal training, learning the product as the staff used it was also important.   However, within a few months of deployment staff were using more advanced features such as automated actions, workload trending to adjust thresholds, SLA trending and dashboards.

The time to recognizable value was very short.  IT staff reported lower mean-time to repair typical problems and their worst “all-hands-on-deck” problems within one month of deploying Longitude.  They estimate that typical problem resolution times improved from hours to less than one hour.  In addition, the staff reported responding to fewer service issues over time, because Longitude’s SLA trending capabilities identified common infrastructure problems and its automated actions allowed technical problems to be resolved before they affected overall service performance.

IT staff were hard pressed to proactively detect and resolve problems with critical business services.  The services were delivered by complex, interacting technology but were being monitored by siloed enterprise management solutions, custom scripts, and freeware utilities.  The staff were looking for a new solution that could scale to monitor the breadth of their infrastructure and provide event correlation needed to automate root-cause analysis of common problems. 

The company found that Heroix Longitude was a cost effective solution that provided the breadth, scalability and event correlation they required. They were able to measure benefits within 6 months of deploying Longitude. The company estimates that problems identified by IT before user complaints started improved from 20-40% range to 60-80% range.  Typical service issues that took days to resolve prior to using Longitude were now being cleared within hours. 

Ease of administration was very important to the IT staff, because their datacenter is growing with more infrastructure and application deployments.  They found that adapting Longitude to manage the increase in applications and infrastructure (by specifying what to monitor on new infrastructure and setting new monitoring thresholds) was a few minutes work that could be done easily as the new infrastructure was deployed. 

After IT staff started reaping the benefits of Longitude, they were tasked with new demands from business managers for more business-oriented reporting. IT staff were able to quickly modify reporting templates included with the product to provide the requested service level reports to the business managers.  Future plans include customizing Longitude’s dashboard for real-time reporting for business users.

The availability and performance of the university’s online and back-office services were being negatively impacted by infrastructure problems that were difficult locate. “Swivel-chair management” plagued root-cause analysis, as IT staff was using a LAN monitoring suite, point products and utilities to troubleshoot problems.

IT immediately put Longitude to work on server and application monitoring and used the dashboard to understand how those events impacted services.  Within two weeks, there was a noticeable reduction in the number of service-level issues because staff could better prioritize their troubleshooting efforts.

"Being able to see all the monitored servers/services in a single pane has reduced our need to look at multiple views to get same information. When alert is noted, [we] can quickly click to drill down."

Within a few months of deployment, Longitude’s workload analysis was being used to improve the set thresholds of key performance indicators and automated actions were implemented to speed repair of common problems. As these capabilities were brought to bear, IT was able to identify the majority of service problems before users called the helpdesk and issues are typically resolved in less than one hour. In the future, IT plans to use Longitude’s graphical SNMP Studio to extend monitoring to their network devices.