Performance Monitoring, Performance Management with the eG Enterprise Suite



Secure monitoring architecture of the eG Enterprise Suite

A Leading Financial Services Company Uses eG Enterprise for
End-to-End Monitoring of its Mission-Critical Business Services
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 one large enterprise in the financial services sector benefited from using eG Enterprise as an integrated console to monitor its heterogeneous IT infrastructure delivering web services to customers.
Challenges
Before deploying eG Enterprise, this financial services company faced many challenges:
The IT operations staff had no visibility end-to-end across a business service.
The domain experts spent a lot of time in routine fire-fighting.
There were blind spots - i.e., critical applications were not being monitored.
The existing management tools did not handle virtualization well.
The operations staff also felt the need for better metrics and reports for performance optimization and capacity planning.
Environment
The company currently monitors over a hundred physical servers, more than one hundred virtualized servers (primarily VMware ESX) and over nine hundred virtual desktops using eG Enterprise. eG Enterprise is being used by the IT operations team as a unified interface to monitor Windows, Solaris, Linux, and AIX operating systems and VMware ESX virtualization platform. Applications monitored using eG Enterprise include IBM HTTP web server, IBM WebSphere application servers, DB2 Universal Database, and Oracle 10G database servers. eG Enterprise is also used to monitor parts of the network infrastructure that are service critical, including WAN links, routers, switches, firewalls, VPN concentrators, and web load balancers.
Benefits Seen
This company started seeing value within one month after installing the eG Enterprise Suite. eG Enterprise has been helping the company in many ways:
To improve the monitoring and reporting of application down times
To reduce service down time (mean time to repair)
To enable helpdesk staff play a more active role in problem detection and isolation
With enhanced post-mortem diagnosis – to determine what happened when a problem occurred
To reduce the time to identify the root cause of a problem – network? server? application? eG Enterprise has been particularly useful in identifying the cause of complex problems that involve multiple domains.
To improve how capacity planning is done
To get an overview of performance bottlenecks
To bridge gaps in their existing monitoring setup – i.e., to monitor critical applications that they did not have monitoring for earlier
To provide visibility end-to-end for business services
Most Useful Features
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 with fewer false alerts
Testimonial
“Overall, eG Enterprise is a very good product, and the support that we have been receiving is excellent. Out of the box, the product does a lot of measures, and is very easy to setup new agents, and monitoring thresholds. One of its most impressive features is that the single agent that you purchase is capable of monitoring over 80+ different applications, such as Windows, Solaris, AIX, SQL, Oracle, UDB, VMWare, Websphere, and the list goes on. Most other companies that I have experience with nickel and dime you to death with agents. This is a great feature.”

“The monitoring is very powerful, and again, out of the box. Not only does it monitor many applications, but for each of those applications, it monitors almost any metrics that you may need, including performance. One feature that we love is the ability to click on a metric and instantly get a history of the values for the past hour, day, week, month. I believe that this product is an excellent monitoring solution, especially for a shop that is starting out with monitoring, or adding a lot of new devices to their existing system.”

“eG Innovations’ sales and engineering staff are excellent and have a very good understanding of our issues.”

“While the product does have its shortcomings, eG Enterprise is an extremely powerful, easy to use product, and with what we have seen to date over the past year, we have not doubt that it will continue to get better. We think it’s a good choice for our shop.”