Resources
Customer Case Studies in Application Performance
The Cement Trucks Keep Rolling with FactFinder
Industry: Materials / Manufacturing
Technical Challenge: Comparing Multiple Virtual Application Systems
Summary: When the truck dispatch application at one of the world's premier construction material companies went haywire, they called BlueStripe for help. It seemed that intermittent performance problems were tied to new virtual servers that were supposed to be identical to previously converted servers. FactFinder discovered all the applications in minutes, found the performance bottlenecks, and proved - once and for all - that virtualization wasn't an issue.
Virtualization Project Makes the Grade with FactFinder
Industry: Higher Education
Technical Challenge: No Visibility into 9-Tier Application
Summary: When the CRM application of one of the world's largest online universities started having performance issues, everybody blamed the new virtualization project. Neither the Operations team, nor the Virtual Infrastructure team, had been able to isolate the application problem. In fact, they hadn't even found the exact location of the problem after months. The new semester was coming up, and they called BlueStripe to get to the heart of the problem before students were impacted. It took less than a minute for FactFinder to discover and map the entire 9 Tier application. Within minutes, FactFinder confirmed that the virtual and non-virtual application instances performed identically. Oh yeah, FactFinder also found the root cause, a poorly performing database that all application systems used.
Ensuring Transaction Connections with FactFinder
Industry: Banking / Finance
Technical Challenge: Constantly changing application systems rendered traditional tools useless
Summary: One of the world's leading financial transaction handling companies wanted more control. Their applications performed as expected, but they were constantly being updated with new technology, such as virtualization. The applications were too critical to update without a plan to certify. Unfortunately, none of their IT management tools could perform what they needed. Traditional Systems Management tools, as well as their CMDB, had no application-level view. Conversely, their APM (application performance management) tools couldn't see past individual platforms. They brought in FactFinder to see how it could help certify application performance. FactFinder's visibility into complete application systems, along with the out-of-the-box comparison reports, allowed the company to create a standard application certification process.
Defense Projects March on with FactFinder
Industry: Defense / Manufacturing
Technical Challenge: Scalability issues with massively distributed worldwide document management application
Summary: When you have collaborative projects all over the world, the ability to communicate and document decisions is critical. Unfortunately, the company was experiencing application outages when about 250 users logged into the document management system. In weeks, the system had to support 1500 concurrent users. With a large collection of different systems integrated around Microsoft SharePoint, the Operations team wasn't sure what even constituted the Document Management Application System. FactFinder discovered the entire application system (including outside users of resources) in a few minutes and found the cause of the outages - a SQL Server database outside of the actual Document Management Application, which caused a SharePoint slow-down. No other tool in the world would have been able to find the problem.
FactFinder Solves Integrated PeopleSoft Application Issues
Industry: Government
Technical Challenge: Existing industry standard systems management tools were inadequate, could not provide the detailed application performance visibility required
Summary: The Technical Infrastructure Director of a US county government contacted BlueStripe. His organization was executing a new server virtualization project. They had already reduced their physical server numbers by 50%, for a savings of ~$125,000. Unfortunately, that was where they ran into a snag. Their PeopleSoft Utility Billing Module was performing poorly after being moved to a virtual environment. After virtualization, users complained that the app was performing slowly. The rest of the virtualization project was on hold until a resolution could be found. BlueStripe was called in to find the root cause.
FactFinder “Rightsizes” Applications on VMs
Industry: Software Development
Technical Challenge: Virtual Machines needed to be provisioned with adequate resources without over provisioning
Summary: BlueStripe was contacted by a senior Network Systems Engineer responsible for hosting development tools at one of the world’s largest software companies. The completely virtual environment under his control was the entire set of platforms for development teams across the company. These critical applications needed to perform well to keep operations running smoothly. Limited visibility into deployed VMs and the number of active projects forced the team to solve performance problems by provisioning more resources - every single time - making resources scarce.
Staying Connected After a Virtual Conversion with FactFinder
Industry: Telecommunications / Service
Technical Challenge: Needed to isolate and resolve problems quickly to keep their applications performing well and to meet SLAs
Summary: One of the world’s largest Telco providers maintains a large data center in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. This facility houses several hundred servers supporting numerous applications and is supported by an experienced IT staff. The System Architect and System Administrator needed to understand their environment to determine which servers could be decommissioned, which were ideal for converting and, most importantly, which supported applications critical to the operation of the company. The goal was to move images, not hardware, with minimal interruption to the business. In their words, they wanted to avoid any “P2V Collateral Damage” during their move.
