IntelliNet Delivers APM Service With CA Unified Infrastructure Management

Transcription

1 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY APRIL 2013 IntelliNet Delivers APM Service With CA Unified Infrastructure Management CLIENT PROFILE Industry: Managed services Year established: 1997 Client: Cleveland Metropolitan School District BUSINESS IntelliNet, an IT Management as a Service (MaaS) Company, is a premier network management and professional information (IT ) consulting firm. CHALLENGE Lorem For IntelliNet ipsum dolor clientsit amet, consecteturmetropolitan Cleveland adipiscing elit. In id enim School District diam. (CMSD), Mauris imperdiet augue unreliable at consequat condimentum. performance was hurting Aliquam user productivity erat volutpat. and Donec a ligula metus. communications. Maecenas lobortis, dui a varius laoreet. SOLUTION Lorem The IntelliNet ipsum dolor Application sit amet, consectetur adipiscing Performance Monitoring elit. In id enim (APM) service, diam. powered Maurisby imperdiet CA Unifiedaugue Infrastructure at consequat condimentum. Management. Aliquam erat volutpat. Donec a ligula metus. Maecenas lobortis, dui a varius laoreet. BENEFIT Lorem By delivering ipsum proactive dolor sit amet, consecteturinsights, monitoring adipiscing theelit. In id enim APM servicediam. helpsmauris the CMSD imperdietservice optimize augue levels at and consequat boost user condimentum. productivity. Aliquam erat volutpat. Donec a ligula metus. Maecenas lobortis, dui a varius laoreet.

2 2 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT APRIL 2013 Challenge The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) is committed to becoming one of the nation s premier school districts. The CMSD is working to build an environment in which students will be challenged with a rigorous curriculum that considers the individual learning styles, preferences and capabilities of each student, while utilizing the highest quality professional educators, administrators and support staff available. With tens of thousands of students, more than 100 facilities and over 5,000 faculty members, the CMSD relies extensively on for communications, both within specific schools and across the district. These communications are vital to enhancing the productivity, collaboration and safety of the school s administrators, teachers, parents and students. However, the organization was experiencing unreliable performance, which was hurting the district s ability to meet its objectives. To accommodate the user needs and bandwidth load required, the CMSD had deployed a network that was broadly distributed across Cleveland. In the past, the school district encountered problems with its platform, which users in different regions would access through a Web client. Users in different areas were experiencing widely varying levels of application performance. However, pinpointing the cause of these performance inconsistencies proved difficult. For example, there wasn t a direct map- ping of users to an application hosting environment, so if a given user reported an issue, it was challenging to determine which specific environment and system was the cause. Solution Decision makers at the school district researched alternatives, and ultimately chose the IntelliNet Application Performance Monitoring (APM) service, powered by CA Unified Infrastructure Management. Through the evaluation process, IntelliNet was able to demonstrate its ability to deliver the proactive application performance management required. To effectively address the district s needs, IntelliNet needed to go beyond traditional infrastructure and application component-centric monitoring. Consequently, in addition to employing CA Unified Infrastructure Management for core monitoring of servers and networking components, the company also leveraged the solution s synthetic monitoring capabilities. With CA Unified Infrastructure Management, the team at IntelliNet set up transaction servers that simulated a number of distinct user interactions and functions. Each transaction is reliant on the back-end infrastructure, and tests such capabilities as whether a user can log in, query the mailbox database or log out, and if so, how long each step takes.

3 3 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT APRIL 2013 Today, IntelliNet s APM service covers approximately 116 different buildings across the school district. By collecting metrics and alarms from the mailbox database and Web access server, and correlating them with synthetic transaction measurements, IntelliNet is able to identify issues that are affecting multiple sites. Further, the IntelliNet APM service can effectively point administrators to the root cause problem that needs to be addressed, rather than associated downstream issues that the underlying issue may trigger. When a bad switch or a router outage is detected, IntelliNet field engineers are assigned the issue to handle remediation, including going on site to do hardware reconfiguration, repairs or replacements. The school district has been relying on the IntelliNet APM service for several years. Implementation methodology In developing its APM services for the CMSD, the IntelliNet team undertook the following key steps: Focusing on the client s charter. From the outset, IntelliNet s account and operations teams focused on the organization s charter. In a very real sense, while they were working with the CMSD, the ultimate clients are the tens of thousands of students the district serves. Prioritizing efforts. Through initial meetings with administrative staff, the IntelliNet team began to identify the applications that were most vital to delivering services required by the student population. This included looking at the most used and most mission-critical areas within their environment to identify the subset of the highest priority applications. Assessing the environment, implementing core monitoring. The IntelliNet operations team began working with the district s administrators to survey the existing environment and application architecture. Equipped with this understanding, the team set out to implement monitoring of the core technologies that supported the delivery of to end users, including network devices and key application servers. Implementing synthetic transaction monitoring. With the core infrastructure monitoring and alarms in place, IntelliNet worked with the school district s application engineer that was responsible for to begin implementing synthetic transactions. This process included defining how the script would be built, which steps would be tested and what kinds of alarms would be generated. They also worked with the district s network engineers to determine the best locations for implementing synthetic transactions.

4 4 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT APRIL 2013 Establishing baselines and dashboards. The IntelliNet team began tracking the metrics being gathered to establish effective baselines and intelligent correlation, so they could begin to implement meaningful alarms. In parallel, the team began to work on the dashboards, including building prototypes, gathering client feedback and refining data presentation. Training. The final implementation phase included training level one NOC staff on how to handle escalation procedures, interpret dashboard data, triage application issues and provide support to CMSD end users. Ongoing improvement. To continue to refine the implementation, IntelliNet runs monthly meetings with district representatives, during which they discuss client feedback, and requests for service additions, modifications and deletions. The solution architecture IntelliNet deployed a proactive APM service that monitored servers at strategic locations across the district: in the colocation facility, the administration building and user sites in the eastern and western regions of the district (see diagram below). By automatically running synthetic transactions from specific locations, the IntelliNet solution provides accurate, timely insights into the performance levels users are experiencing. At each site, the servers use different connections and network paths to access the environment. Each transaction server would attempt to log into each server instance and complete its work. For example, the server located at the user site on the east side would execute the same series of transactions against all four server environments (as depicted in the graphic above). Through this approach, the team at IntelliNet could verify that all the different network paths were being tested.

5 5 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT APRIL 2013 The team at IntelliNet deployed a transaction server in the colocation site s data center because that is where the infrastructure is hosted. Consequently, this server would provide a strong performance baseline. Because the transaction server and servers reside in the same facility, the connection should be the fastest possible, without any latency associated with Internet connectivity. They also opted to implement synthetic transaction monitoring within the administrative office, which is where a lot of the most vital communications originate. Finally, given that some buildings connect through high capacity optic networks, and others rely on lower bandwidth cable and DSL connections, they implemented transactions at sites that relied on these different networks, so they would have a picture of how user experience would be affected by network throughput. In order to establish effective baselines, the team at IntelliNet ran synthetic transactions for a few weeks without turning on alarms. Once effective baselines were gathered, the team then used those to create the monitoring thresholds that, when exceeded, would trigger alarms. If synthetic transactions at different sites started taking longer than the established baseline, alarms would be sent to enable proactive remediation. Root cause analysis When alarms are generated, they are routed to IntelliNet s APM alarm servers. As outlined earlier, these alarms are based on metrics gathered through infrastructure monitoring as well as synthetic transaction monitoring, and this data is correlated to facilitate more effective alarms and root cause analysis. When an alarm associated with the service is generated, a call is automatically triggered to the administrator, so that individual can immediately examine the affected database and begin remediation. Further, this correlation is invaluable in helping identify whether the issue is arising within the infrastructure or at the ISP. The team at IntelliNet is also able to see, for example, if the transactions generated at the user site on the east side are being plagued by slow connectivity, and if so, contact that facility s network administrators so they can address the issue and restore network performance. To more effectively define correlation logic, the team at IntelliNet found that it was important to identify different use cases for the application. For example, if one monitoring server indicates that the database is slow for a specific use case, IntelliNet administrators may also know a related transaction step will also run slowly. As a result, they can then better distinguish between the root cause of issues and the associated downstream symptoms that the underlying problem may create.

6 6 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT APRIL 2013 In addition, the data collected through the monitoring servers is used to populate service dashboards (see sample below). These dashboards provide an overview of the environment, including response times and availability to the users, which the school district can display in its operations center. IntelliNet has implemented user response monitoring at several locations within the CMSD network. The above is an actual dashboard that the team at IntelliNet provided to the CMSD. Each one of the objects depicted corresponds to the locations where IntelliNet deployed a transaction server to query the application. This dashboard view provides a quick overview of the health of the application as measured from the different user locations. The green bar under each location graphic indicates performance is within an optimal range. If an issue arises, the color of the bar changes based on the severity of the performance impact, indicating whether the issue is minor (yellow), major (orange) or critical (red).

7 7 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT APRIL 2013 If a problem were to arise with one of the sites, school district staff would be able to click on the graphic object to load a secondary, drill-down view showing the transaction steps for the application. The dashboard below depicts the resulting screen. Each object in this drill-down view represents a transaction step that is color coded according to its alarm severity. This view also provides actual transaction response time measurements. The IntelliNet solution features dashboards that provide at-a-glance views into the performance of key user interactions. If a given transaction step encounters a critical failure, for example, generating a failure to load or failure to complete transaction result, the step would be covered by a red X. These high level dashboards and correlated monitoring metrics provide administration and support staff with at-a-glance insights into the current status of all application transaction steps and subsystems monitored. Further, they enable administrators to dig into the details of a specific system, so they can quickly understand when failures occur, and where. Benefit By proactively managing service levels, the administrators and faculty within the school district are able to enjoy better responsiveness and availability for their communications, which are essential to their being able to fulfill their respective charters of educating and protecting students. For the administrative staff, is an essential channel for communicating efficiently with the district s thousands of teachers, across more than 100 locations. Further, is the mechanism for communicating with the parent community, including providing critical updates around student safety. Likewise, faculty use for sending information and requests to administrative staff.

8 8 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT APRIL 2013 This service has helped the school district realize cost benefits. The IT team has been able to make a significant move, going from being reactive to proactive, and as a result significant time savings have been realized. Now, administrators are not constantly saddled with calls about outages and slow response. They re now able to resolve issues much more efficiently and quickly, which saves head count for more meaningful efforts. About IntelliNet Corporation IntelliNet, an IT Management as a Service (MaaS) Company, is a premier network management and professional information technology (IT) consulting firm. IntelliNet implements solutions worldwide. From our 24x7x365 Network Operations Center (NOC), we manage applications in 44 states, 25 countries, and 4 continents. IntelliNet s fully managed services include Application Performance, Network Support, Cloud and Hosting Services, Service Desk, and Application Development. Founded in 1997, IntelliNet has a long history of success in delivering cost-effective managed services. IntelliNet s customers range from Fortune 500 companies to small and mid-sized businesses and local and regional government agencies. Whether working with an international, publically traded company or a small, locally owned business, the IntelliNet solution starts with building customer relationships on a foundation of quality and uncommon attention to service. For more information about IntelliNet, go to intellinetcorp.com. *Please note that, in September 2014, the product name in the original customer success story was updated from CA Nimsoft Monitor to CA Unified Infrastructure Management Connect with CA Technologies at CA Technologies helps customers succeed in a future where every business from apparel to energy is being rewritten by software. With CA software at the center of their IT strategy, organizations can leverage the technology that changes the way we live from the data center to the mobile device. Our software and solutions help our customers thrive in the new application economy by delivering the means to deploy monitor and secure their applications and infrastructure. To learn more about our customer success programs, visit / customer-success. For more information about CA Technologies go to. CA All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only, and does not form any type of warranty. The Customer success story is based on the actual experiences of the user but product descriptions may not reflect uses in all environments so actual results may vary.