When performing updates to our IT environment we would sometimes run into a few bottlenecks. Prior to eG Innovations, we had a very hard time identifying and rectifying the issue quickly. 
Key Benefits to Partner Solutions
With eG Enterprise, Partner Solutions now has full visibility of its entire IT infrastructure and can monitor performance through a single dashboard. This integrated performance monitoring and management approach helps Partner Solutions keep their customers happy and productive by:
- Decreasing downtime and accelerating problem resolution
- Reducing IT support incidents, cost and complexity
- Increasing end user satisfaction and productivity
- Enabling faster and more accurate right-sizing of the IT infrastructure to keep up with business growth
Why eG Enterprise?
- End-to-end across all tiers and layers of the environment with deep visibility into Citrix
- Powerful analytics, reporting and auto-diagnosis capabilities
- Faster diagnosis and resolution of service performance issues
- Minimize the number of subject-matter experts needed to diagnose performance problems
Automating Performance Management Across all IT Domains
Partner Solutions is a Citrix Certified Solution Advisor. They allow brokers to connect to their infrastructure via Citrix to reliably and quickly submit forms to insurance providers.
Any degradation in IT performance negatively impacts broker productivity, satisfaction and revenue. When service slows, brokers and insurance companies may not able to complete the policy application process and brokers my have a hard time submitting their customers' claims. Therefore, high application availability and top-notch networking performance is a must.
The IT Environment Partner Solutions
Partner Solutions provides its customers with turn-key managed insurance solutions. The insurance applications are hosted on virtualized Citrix XenApp servers, and brokers access these applications using thin clients. In addition to dedicated insurance services, Partner Solutions offers customers a complete complement of Microsoft software including email access and calendaring. Data processing is handled by backend database servers. File and print servers are available as well. All of the applications are hosted on a virtual platform based on VMware. In total, the IT infrastructure has over 300 servers.
To manage this infrastructure, the Partner Solutions IT team mostly relied on the monitoring and administration tools provided with the different software and hardware tiers. For instance, Citrix EdgeSight was used for monitoring Citrix XenApp, and VMware vCenter was used for monitoring the VMware tier. These off-the-shelf tools were augmented with homegrown scripts for problem identification and diagnosis. To diagnose and fix problems, the Partner Solutions IT team followed a manual process. Metrics from different tools and scripts had to be analyzed and an expert had to correlate across these metrics to deduce what was causing a problem.
As the Partner Solutions insurance broker base expanded, performance problems began to increase. These problems such as system slowness, had an adverse effect on broker productivity and insurance company revenues. When a performance problem occurred, brokers were not able to write insurance policies at all, or would accomplish their tasks at a slower rate than they would normally. Hence, the Partner Solutions IT team was under significant pressure to reduce the number of outages and slowdowns.
The slow, manual performance monitoring and troubleshooting process was inadequate. For example, when performing updates to a Windows server, the server would freeze and the IT support team was often not able clearly identify the root cause of the problem. This slowed down the process of verifying and deploying a new application in the IT infrastructure. Even when problem diagnosis was done, it was very time consuming.
Roberto Trombino, Technical Team Lead of Operations at Partner Solutions had this to say about why the company started looking for a comprehensive performance monitoring solution: "We were in an extremely reactive mode. We had automated scripts that were monitoring pieces of the infrastructure yet we still had to manually aggregate the information and figure out the cause of the problem. This process was very slow and very time consuming; we were always in reactive mode." Therefore, the Partner Solutions IT team needed to find a performance monitoring solution that could reduce trouble-shooting times and quickly remediate performance challenges and associated costs.
Partner Solutions evaluated a variety of performance monitoring solutions before selecting eG Innovations. One of the key reasons why Partner Solutions selected eG Innovations was because eG Innovations provided the only performance monitoring and management solution capable of managing the entire IT infrastructure, end-to-end across all tiers and layers of the environment, with deep visibility into the Citrix tier - a key requirement for the company.
With eG Enterprise, the Partner Solutions IT team is able to monitor the entire infrastructure from a single web-based management console. This 360-degree service visibility into every tier and every layer of the IT infrastructure - from network to applications - combined with powerful analytics, reporting and auto-diagnosis capabilities helps Partner Solutions dramatically accelerate the discovery, diagnosis, and resolution of service performance issues.
Intuitive, rich, service-oriented topology views of the IT infrastructure with simple color-code cues show IT service health and lead Partner Solutions' IT administrators to the exact location of performance problems in the underlying infrastructure. A simple dashboard interface and a consistent layer model representation reduce support time and complexity. In addition, with eG Enterprise, Partner Solutions can automate both the identification and resolution of issues - before users notice.
The Solution: Full Visibility Through Unified IT Monitoring
eG Enterprise auto-diagnosis capabilities helps Partner Solutions quickly pinpoint and fix the true root cause of performance issues. Not only do these features substantially reduce the time it takes to identify and remediate the cause of an issue, they also minimize the number of subject-matter experts needed to diagnose performance problems. Automatic alerting and deep dive analytics and reporting help to find bottlenecks and keep an eye on all of the systems in the Partner Solutions IT environment. "If the Citrix service has a hiccup, issues can be rectified before customers realize," said Roberto.
With eG Enterprise, the Partner Solutions team can now proactively service insurance brokers and maintain user satisfaction. The IT team is in control and problem resolution is quick and painless.