Despite their ability to monitor availability and resource consumption (CPU, RAM, Disk…), our SNMP monitoring tools (Microsoft SCOM) did not provide any useful information to deal with user complaints. “Wireshark”, which we used to use for firefighting operations, could not provide us with an easy way to understand the origin of an issue.
First, we felt the need to monitor proactively our IT usage, as well as the performance of both our network and applications. In case of complaint, we wanted to be able to quickly qualify:
Second, due to the limited WAN capacities with a maximum of 10Mbps per connection, we needed to fully understand our network usage: which application was using which capacity and when? The objectives were to be able to anticipate congestions and their nasty consequences on our users and to get the right information to optimize our network and its usage.
Our IT infrastructure partner, AB Network, presented Performance Vision from SecurActive, which seemed to respond to our requirements. To validate its capabilities in a real life environment, we organized a proof of concept with AB Network. The conclusion was fully positive!
Each collaborator of the IT team has a full access to the solution. Each of us looks at the information he needs to execute his tasks: two developers, two people in charge of the infrastructure administration, one person in charge of the relationship between industrial engineering and IT, and myself:
Our team is currently working on a degradation that appeared on a customized application which relies on VB6 to query our SQL databases. I have no doubt that we will find the necessary elements to solve this problem in a very short timeframe.
On my end, I read a daily report to validate that our response times (application, network, and bandwidth) are fine. Automated, these reports represent no additionally workload for my team and allow us to share an objective history of our network & application performances and usage.
After 15 months of use, our feeling is strongly positive. I recommend Performance Vision to other IT directors on a regularly basis, to have a good visibility on the network and to diagnose or optimize the performance of their IT. It is a key element to help our teams to efficiently collaborate both at the development and infrastructure levels.
Beyond the savings gained on the IT team’s productivity, the reduction of the performance degradations for the business users, the monitoring of our bandwidths and the optimization of our applications, Performance Vision also helped saving the money we would otherwise have spent in the upgrade of our WAN network.