DST started the search for a performance response time management system
immediately following the completion of its Y2K program so that they could offer
their customers the highest level of satisfaction available when it came to the
level of service that they where able to offer their customers. "A number of
Service Level Management reporting tools where piloted, but only NTi ProView
could measure the entire end-to-end segmented transaction response time from the
mainframe , through all servers, routers and all other network devices to the
client. We looked at Compuware, Lucent, IBM Tivoli, BMC
and NetIQ and quite frankly none of them did Service Level Measurement and
reporting like NTi ProView", said Bob Sindorf, Manager of Network Services.
DST's commitment to providing its financial services and telecommunications
customers with the highest quality of outsourced IT services placed extreme
demands on their computing and network environments. With the NTi ProView
Enterprise solution, DST was able to continuously monitor (24x7x365) the
end-to-end performance and availability of their redundant data centers, thus
ensuring their objectives of five-9s uptime for their mainframe and distributed
environments and their service level goals.
Using the NTi Web Reporter, DST is now able to provide meaningful real-time drilldown
capabilities to their service centers and support staff. DST management
now has on-demand access to Service Level Compliance and Performance Summary
reports that can be provided to all of their customers leading to a greater
customer satisfaction level than has been achieved to date. Before the contract
was signed, DST required staff mathematicians to verify NTi ProView's
measurement accuracy and prove the validity of their calculations.
MCI Telecommunications, Inc.
MCI was a very early adopter of the NTi technologies to measure call
center performance. The MCI call centers represented a major segment of the MCI
marketing plan for selling telecommunications products and services and involved eight
centers with 300 customer service representatives per center. Application
performance, as seen by the user, was very poor with frequent outages. Many
user complaints were being received by the MCI Network Operation Center (NOC) but existing
tools could not diagnose or identify what, in the supporting IT infrastructure, was
causing the performance degradation problems. Because of the redundant bridge
architecture of the MCI backbone that linked the user sites to the mainframe sites,
diagnosis, problem isolation, and problem resolution were made even more difficult.
Because of the unique mainframe and file server testing capabilities,
ProView was selected and deployed throughout MCI's Enterprise Network to allow network managers to monitor response times that end users experience and the
availability of the mainframe applications and information systems across their corporate
networks. As part of a purchase agreement, NTi provided additional enhancements
to ProView which allowed MCI to measure end-to-end performance of their mainframe
applications and isolate slow network segments that were impacting users.
MCI used ProView as a first line of defense, or
"RapidAlert", in their central NOC. "RapidAlert" allowed MCI
to proactively identify Host and File Server response time, availability, and connectivity
problems across their Enterprise Network -- before their customers were impacted.
John Pittle, Senior Systems Engineer for MCI, said that by using ProView to monitor their
network, "We are far more proactive in solving problems on our network, before they
become severely user impacting. With ProView as a first line of defense, we are
positioned to detect a problem before our customer does, determine who's impacted and
who's not impacted, and isolate the root cause of the problem faster than we've been able
to in the past. MCI has reduced mean-time-to-repair and increased customer
satisfaction". The ProView system was very instrumental in reducing the
time-to-problem-identification from 72 hours to 4 hours.
BASF of Germany
BASF was also an early adopter of the NTi performance measurement
technologies. The BASF environment required the measurement of performance from
distributed offices throughout Germany and surrounding European countries. Internal
and external users were accessing databases residing on BASF mainframes through PC
emulation software. Customer complaints were being received on a very frequent basis
by BASF's network operations staff that the database applications were unavailable
and were impacting the business transactions that must be performed daily.
BASF selected ProView to measure the response time and
availability from each remote site to help BASF stay in compliance with service
level agreements that had been negotiated with each of the user groups and external
customers. BASF installed a ProView Agent for OS/2 in each remote site to generate
an SNA 3270 transaction to the ProView MVS/VTAM Host echo software located on each
of the mainframe LPARs that were being used to access the various databases. The
ProView OS/2 Agent would time stamp the transaction when sent and received to measure the
round- trip response time and thus provide a network measurement that could be used to
identify network performance problems and satisfy complaints. The continuous (24x7)
transactions also provided a measurement of each LPAR availability that was running the
database application without additional testing or traffic overhead. With full
deployment of ProView, BASF was able to significantly reduce their user and customer
complaints.
NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA/JPL was experiencing performance problem with their administrative
users trying to access the financial applications that were running under CICS on their
mainframes. The network topology involved the use of data bridges with radio
frequency interfaces that could send data over coaxial cable from remote buildings
that were used outside of the laboratory to backbone LANs in the data centers.
Administrative users were seeing long response times from some sites and not from others
and at unpredictable times during the normal business hours.
ProView was installed in the remote buildings on each user group
floor to measure the response time of CICS applications running in the data centers.
ProView was used by the JPL administrative user groups to monitor the network and
application services that were being provided by the enterprise networking group. By
using the ProView continuous monitoring and component isolation capabilities, JPL was able
to improve performance and provide critical performance baseline metrics for networking
upgrades that being planned.
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Last modified: March 1, 2004