Now you can see the whole process

The Business Problem

Many companies have critical business processes that are supported by a complex IT infrastructure. These processes must be monitored in real-time to prevent lost revenue and poor customer service resulting from slow performance and outages. Conventional system tools cannot measure IT system performance and availability from the business user’s perspective, and cannot accurately monitor compliance with Service Level Agreements.

The Insight:SLM Solution

By measuring actual end-user experience as business transactions flow across heterogeneous IT systems – rather than monitoring individual system components – InsightETE records true end-user IT performance to verify SLA compliance. InsightETE’s open architecture maximizes flexibility by integrating into exiting frameworks wherever possible, maximizing tool synergy. InsightETE’s technology gathers all the data needed to measure performance (system response time to user requests), analyze problems and track availability (accessibility of the application) from the business perspective. Installations can be set up and fully operational in just a few days or even a few hours.

Our Value Proposition

Because IT downtime and poor performance is so costly to the business, true end-user monitoring results in significant cost avoidance. InsightETE adds the unique ability to analyze IT from the ‘top-down’. This ‘top-down’ approach begins with the users (business processes) and continues down through the IT infrastructure. Triage of problems can be based on their relative affect on the business rather than based on the typical, ‘first come, first served’, method used today.

Often, IT operations savings alone will pay for InsightETE in a matter of months. Typical IT savings results from:

• Automated problem detection
• Elimination of manual SLA data collection
• Reduction in staff-hours for analyzing and correcting problems
• Reduced tool maintenance fees
• Rapid installation and configuration
• Reduction in equipment purchases by efficiently deploying new system assets

Business savings include:

• More efficient business operations from reduced downtime and consistent responsiveness
• Rapid problem resolution
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Increased revenues from customer-facing applications (e.g.: online banking, credit card sales, call center operations, reservation systems, etc.)

How It Works

InsightETE is a distributed system consisting of a base SLM server and transaction monitors (tMonitorsä). Unlike component monitoring tools, which gather availability data directly from each system component, InsightETE tracks actual user transactions as they traverse IT systems. This is what sets InsightETE’s solution apart – only InsightETE measures true end-user system performance and availability of actual business transactions.

When a user request triggers multiple reply transactions on the back end – such as accessing two different applications or pulling data from multiple databases – the Insight:SLM system matches the single outgoing request transaction to all of the reply transactions, resulting in a true picture of complete end-user response time.

The SLM Server

The Insight:SLM server is a fully scaleable MS Wintel server or server cluster. The server runs the reporting website, Insight:SLM Managerä software, and the SLM database. The manager software processes and analyzes the data provided by the tMonitors. The SLM server can be placed anywhere in the client’s production environment.

SLM tMonitor™

The Insight:SLM tMonitor measures transaction response time for both the server environment and network down to the user workstation. It also collects both network and server environment availability information for all end-users. tMonitor is a stand-alone Unix/Linux based device running the InsightETE transaction filter (tFilter™) to measure network and server environment time and availability filters (tsAvail™ and tnAvail™) to track network and server availability. It is typically placed in the network segment where the production servers reside.

The tMonitor watches transaction traffic from every end-user and creates a transaction audit trail for every system it is designated to watch. This audit trail consists of information for each ‘end-user’ transactions from the end-user view. To an end-user, a transaction response time is the time from when a request is started, usually when an enter key or mouse click is hit, until the response returns and is displayed on the user’s workstation. tMonitor gathers the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘who’ and ‘time’ for each transaction. This detail consists of the begin and end timestamp for the transaction, the time spent on the network, time spent in the server environment, the client IP address, the network segment where the end-user resides, the server IP address, the Transaction ID, the User ID, return code for the transaction, and additional information depending on the type of application (i.e. entity tags for BPM, software release, etc).

Because of the passive, non-intrusive way it is deployed, tMonitor can work with any type of system, no matter what platforms are used in the application environment, including mainframe, Unix, Tandem, and Microsoft based platforms. Any ‘client-server’ type system can be readily and instantly monitored. Many protocols, using both UDP and TCPIP based transports, have additional capabilities including Bank ATMs, Argo Data, Spectrum, MQ Series, CICS, DB2, Oracle, Jacada, etc. tFilter™ can easily be configured for any ‘home grown’ type application

Alerting

Insight:SLM has an integrated ability for flexible alerts using SNMP, email, or direct Database connection. Alerts can be very specifically directed to systems or individuals for both response time thresholds and availability issues based on Business processes, geographic locations, or systems. For instance, the manager of a call center located in Topeka can receive an email alert when a ‘call center’ application has slow response time for Topeka. The same alert can be directed to the command center using SNMP.

Analysis

Insight:SLM along with Insight:Analyzer automatically gathers transaction detail for quick analysis of problems when alerts are generated. This data includes details of transactions for all ‘back-end’ tiers of an application system including the application servers, and database servers. Several reports are readily available that point out the likely culprits of slow response times and availability issues. This information can readily be made available to centralized correlation engines.

Since ALL real end-user transactions are captured, the usage characteristics of an application system is available for business analysis, Capacity Planning (Insight:CAP), and application improvement.

Service Management Frameworks

To protect your investment in technology, Insight:SLM was designed to include the concept of easy integration with other tools using direct database connections, client-server sockets, SNMP, email, etc.

Insight:SLM embraces the industry standard concepts of a ‘Federated Database’ allowing integration into your Service Management Framework or CMDB.

Monitoring & Reporting

 

Sample Screen Shots

Customers can monitor their SLAs via a Insight:SLM browser-based graphical dashboard portal. Administrators may define user views to limit who sees what data, and can integrate existing security tools. Service level problems are shown as changes in profile status (green to yellow to red) on the dashboard whenever preset thresholds are crossed. Additional SLA scorecards and more than 60 canned charts and reports can be displayed and printed. Scheduled reports can be generated and forwarded via e-mail automatically. In addition, Insight:SLM’s open schema allows easy connection to Crystal, Cognos, and other tools for automated reporting, analysis, problem tickets, etc.

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