A Global 500 Banking Company Benefits from the Collaborative Management Capabilities of eG Enterprise eG Innovations partnered with TechValidate, a trusted authority for collection and generation of customer feedback on software products, to conduct a survey of current users of its eG Enterprise performance monitoring, diagnosis, and reporting solutions. Here is how a Global 500 Banking Company Benifits from the Collaborative Management Capabilities of eG Enterprise. Challenges The bank looked at eG Enterprise to address the following business challenges that it was facing: Application response times were poor and I didn't know why Did not have good benchmarks on the end-user experience Critical applications were not being monitored No visibility end-to-end across a business service Unplanned system downtime was high and I needed to know why Lot of finger-pointing during problem diagnosis Help desk was not able to contribute much to problem diagnosis and isolation Users knew of problems before operations staff did Needed better metrics and reports for optimization and capacity planning Existing management tools were too expensive and return on investment was poor Environment The bank monitors a heterogeneous IT infrastructure with a mix of Windows and Sun Solaris servers hosting critical business applications. Virtualization is being used to optimize server provisioning and increase the agility of IT operations to meet new business needs. VMware ESX technology is widely used, while Solaris Container technology available in Solaris 10 is also employed for resource sharing. The bank's critical Internet facing infrastructure uses a typical multi-tier architecture with web servers (Sun Java web server, Apache and Microsoft IIS) in the front-end. A mix of middleware technologies including WebLogic, WebSphere and Apache Tomcat is used. The bank's core banking infrastructure uses the Corillian Voyager platform. For the backend, the bank uses Oracle and Microsoft database servers. Single sign-on is implemented using Siteminder Policy servers. Currently, the bank monitors about 650 physical servers and about 40 virtualized servers (VMware ESX and Solaris Container servers) with eG Enterprise. Besides these, a number of network devices - routers, switches, web accelerators, etc. are monitored using eG Enterprise. Benefits Seen The bank seeing value less than one week after installing the eG Enterprise Suite. Over the five plus years that it has used eG Enterprise, the bank has seen a reduction in the time to identify the root cause of performance issues in their infrastructure by 26% or more. The bank's staff found that eG Enterprise helped them to identify relatively simple problems quickly, in identifying the cause of complex problems that involve multiple domains, and with improved capacity planning. Key benefits that the bank has seen as a result of its eG Enterprise deployment include: Identifying problems before users do Improved monitoring and reporting of application down time Reduction in service down time (mean time to repair) Helpdesk staff play a more active role in problem detection and isolation Enhanced post-mortem diagnosis – to determine what happened when a problem occurred Improved monitoring and reporting of compliance with service level agreements Reduced time to identify the root cause of a problem – network? server? application? Fewer experts needed to identify the root cause of a problem Improved capacity planning Improved overview of performance bottlenecks Most Useful Features The bank's staff found the most useful features of eG Enterprise to be: Single agent monitoring – one agent per server – for monitoring the OS and applications Layer model of applications to clearly highlight which layer is a problem Service topologies to indicate which component of a service is problematic Automatic baselining (aka, dynamic thresholds) Real-time monitoring and alerting Testimonial The bank's IT staff recommend the eG Innovations Enterprise Suite because of its: Easy to use and understand user interface Wide range of applications and servers Ability to quickly and accurately determine the root cause of a problem in real time Real-time alerting capability that generates fewer false alerts Excellent sales and engineering staff and have a very good understanding of customer issues “I can't say enough about the excellent support and professionalism that eG provides. eG's support and action on new enhancements has been refreshing and not usually found by other vendors”.