Tag: application performance management

Integrating Splunk ITSI and Observability Cloud for Unified Insights

The Splunk Observability Cloud suite (O11y) delivers powerful real-time infrastructure and application monitoring capabilities, while Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) enables holistic and fully customisable service modelling and impact analysis. When these two technologies are integrated, they effortlessly bridge the gap between tracking infrastructure performance and the overall well-being of your business service.

Making Splunk Core Aware of O11y

A fundamental aspect of integrating ITSI and O11y is making observability metrics available to Splunk Core, and in turn, to Splunk ITSI and IT Essentials Work. For this you’ll need…

This is a Splunk built add-on available on Splunkbase: Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring Add-on.
While the name points to the SIM portion of the O11y suite, the Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring Add-on facilitates access to all O11y metrics, including APM, RUM and Synthetic Monitoring metrics.
NOTE: It is only O11y metric data that can be made available to Splunk Core – not the traces and spans from which these metric results and metadata originate.

SIM Add-on Integration Options

The add-on offers two integration options:
1. Enable Splunk Core to Query O11y Metric Stores
The Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring Add-on introduces a new SPL command called “sim” which allows you to specify a SignalFlow program for querying observability metrics in an SPL search. The SignalFlow program will be run on the remote O11y instance, and the returned metrics can then be processed in the remainder of the SPL search. 

2. Ingesting O11y Metrics into Splunk Indexes
The add-on also contains modular inputs which can be used to index O11y metrics in Splunk Core indexes. You are able to configure these modular inputs by specifying a SignalFlow program which will be run periodically to query the desired O11y metric summaries and index the results in Splunk Core.

NOTE: Ensure that the “stash” source type is always used for the data collected by these modular inputs (as in their default state) so that the collected metrics will not count toward Splunk licence charges.

Where to Install the SIM Add-on

Depending on which integration options are required, the add-on will need to be installed in at least one of these Splunk Core nodes:

Search Heads:
Required on any Search Heads where the “sim” command will be used in SPL searches to query O11y metrics.  In particular, this add-on will be required on Splunk ITSI instances utilising the “sim” command in KPI searches.

Indexers:
Required on any Indexer node/cluster where target metric store indexes are created for ingesting O11y metrics via the SIM add-on modular inputs. The add-on creates an index called “sim_metrics“ which should be used as the default target for O11y metrics as it will not count toward Splunk licence charges (and remember to specify “stash” sourcetype in the modular inputs as noted above).

Forwarders:
Required on any Heavy Forwarder node which will be running the SIM add-on modular inputs to query O11y metrics.

Which Integration Option Is Best?

While it is not possible to give a “one size fits all” answer, consider the following:

The “sim” command is lightning-fast
This is because the metric store of O11y is lightning-fast. By design, the O11y platform is capable of storing and retrieving massive volumes of highly granular data in real time. So performance is rarely a consideration when writing SPL searches using the “sim” command.

The Modular Inputs Duplicate Predetermined Metric Summaries
With the modular inputs of the add-on, you are able to decide ahead of time what O11y metric data you’d like to summarise and index in Splunk Core and at what intervals. While this will only be a subset of the original data that is being indexed, it is still duplication which might not be necessary in a given use case. More to the point, searching the summarised data indexed in Splunk Core lacks the flexibility of using “sim” searches to query metrics directly from O11y, which can be changed on the fly without ever needing to update any modular inputs or re-ingest any data.

Querying O11y directly with the “sim” command would often be the more desirable option.  However, in some scenarios it may be necessary to index O11y metrics in Splunk Core, e.g if security policies prevent certain Splunk Core users from getting direct access to O11y.
TIP: Use the O11y plot editor to create and test SignalFlow programs which can then be copied into “sim” commands in Splunk Core searches and ITSI KPIs.

Enriching ITSI with O11y Knowledge

The sky’s the limit when modelling systems in ITSI, and for large or complex service models you’ll want to leverage templates and pre-built components instead of re-inventing the wheel.
Content Packs are the mechanism in ITSI for bundling pre-built components, and for O11y content in particular there is…

The Content Pack bundles a set of valuable ITSI knowledge objects which can be leveraged for managing and visualising O11y data, including:
> Services and KPIs
> Service Templates and KPI Base Searches
> Glass Tables and a Service Analyser
> Entity Types and Entity Import Jobs

As with those of any ITSI content pack, many of the above components may not be directly usable for a given use case. They may instead serve as examples or initial templates to the custom content you will be creating.
At the very least, the below entity import jobs from the content pack are invaluable for effortlessly bringing in all O11y-discovered objects to the ITSI entity database:
> ITSI Import Objects – Get_OS_Hosts
> ITSI Import Objects – Get_RUM_*
> ITSI Import Objects – Get_SIM_AWS_*
> ITSI Import Objects – Get_SIM_Azure_*
> ITSI Import Objects – Get_SIM_GCP_*
> ITSI Import Objects – SSM_get_entities_*
> ITSI Import Objects – Splunk-APM Application Entity Search

Whatever the situation, it is in your best interest to install the Content Pack for Splunk Observability Cloud in ITSI when integrating with the O11y suite.

Installing the O11y Content Pack

The latest O11y Content Pack requires the following two add-ons to be installed in the Splunk Core environment first:
> Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring Add-on – The Splunk-built add-on described earlier in this document
> Splunk Synthetic Monitoring Add-on – A SplunkWorks-built add-on (not formally released by Splunk)

Also, if the Content Pack for Splunk Infrastructure monitoring was previously installed in ITSI, then there are additional migration steps to perform before installing the O11y content pack:
> Migrate from the Content Pack for Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring to the Content Pack for Splunk Observability Cloud topic

After the above items are addressed, the method for installing the Content Pack in ITSI is the same as with any other content pack, i.e. via Configuration > Data Integrations > Content Library.
TIP: When installing the content pack, consider using the option of adding a prefix to the names of imported content such as services, service templates and KPI base searches. That way they can be easily identified as examples which can be copied from. This is not so important for items like the entity import jobs (and you may then need to separate imports for differently named objects).

Unified Alerting with O11y and ITSI

In an environment armed with ITSI, an ideal strategy is to consolidate alert management  with ITSI as the central point for processing alerts originating from any Splunk sources such as O11y, as well as from external systems. ITSI’s advanced analytics can be leveraged to implement intelligent alert logic and the alerts actions can interface to Splunk On-Call for escalation management.

This Content Pack is required in ITSI for integrating O11y and ITSI alerting. It comes with correlation searches and aggregation policies that are utilised in the integration procedure (as noted in the High Level Implementation Plan further below).
Installing this Content Pack requires additional version-dependent actions as well as an update to the “Itsi_kpi_attributes” lookup. Please follow the below installation instructions:
Installing and Configuring the Content Pack for ITSI Monitoring and Alerting

Universal Alerting

Splunk have defined the Universal Alerting Field Normalisation Standard in ITSI for which there are pre-built correlation searches provided in the Monitoring and Alerting Content Pack. Normalising alerts to adhere to this schema ensures that alerts from any source can be processed in a common fashion using the pre-built content.
The schema details many fields, many of which are optional, and the following 4 are mandatory for any alert to comply:
> src: the target of the alert, e.g. host, device, service etc.
> signature: a string which uniquely identifies the type of alert
> vendor_severity: the original vendor-specific severity/health/status string
> severity_id: normalised severity

High Level Implementation Plan

  1. Configure O11y to send alerts to Splunk Enterprise or Cloud Platform:
    This requires creating an alert index in Splunk Core (labelled “Alert Index” in the above diagram), and a HEC endpoint. Then in O11y you can configure a new “Webhook” integration to send alerts to the HEC endpoint.
  2. Normalise O11y alerts to conform to the ITSI Universal Alerting schema
  3. Configure “Universal Correlation Search – o11y” to create notable events:
    This correlation search is shipped with the ITSI Monitoring and Alerting content pack
  4. Configure the “Episodes by Application/SRC o11y” notable event aggregation policy (NEAP):
    Also shipped with the ITSI Monitoring and Alerting content pack
  5. Configure ITSI correlation searches for monitoring aggregated episodes:
    The below 2 searches, also from the content pack:
    “Episode Monitoring – Set Episode to Highest Alarm Severity o11y”
    “Episode Monitoring – Trigger OnCall Incident”
  6. Integrate Splunk On-Call with ITSI:
    This requires installation of the Splunk On-Call (VictorOps) addon in Splunk core, and configuring it with the details of an O11y Splunk On-Call account
  7. Configure action rules in the ITSI NEAP from step 4 for Splunk On-Call Integration
  8. Configure Splunk On-Call with appropriate escalation policies

Full implementation details are documented on the Splunk Lantern site: Managing the lifecycle of an alert from detection to remediation

Next Steps

Now you have the playbook to integrate the Splunk Observability Cloud suite with Splunk ITSI. 
JDS excels in delivering tailored solutions for our customers where we integrate their O11y suite with Splunk ITSI, optimising alert management and reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
Reach out if you would like help or advice in improving your observability and troubleshooting efficiency with Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk ITSI.


Read a recent JDS Customer Success Story here.

Monitoring Atlassian Suite with AppDynamics

Millions of IT professionals use JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket daily as the backbone of their software lifecycle. These tools are critical to getting anything done in thousands of organisations. If you’re reading this, it’s safe to guess that’s the case for your organisation too!

Application monitoring is crucial when your business relies on good application performance. Just knowing that your application is running isn’t enough; you need assurance that it’s performing optimally. This is what a JDS client that runs in-house instances of JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket, recently found out.

This client, a major Australian bank, started to notice slowness with JIRA, but the standard infrastructure monitoring they were using was not providing enough insight to allow them to determine the root cause.

JDS was able to instrument their Atlassian products with AppDynamics APM agents to gain insights into the performance of the applications. After deployment of the Java Agents to the applications, AppDynamics automatically populated the topology map below, known as a Flow Map. This Flow Map shows the interactions for each application, accompanied by overall application and Business Transaction health, and metrics like load, response time, and errors.

After some investigation, we found the root cause of the JIRA slowness was some Memcached backends. Once we determined the root cause and resolved the issue, operational dashboards were created to help the Operations team monitor the Atlassian application suite. Below is a screenshot of a subsection of the dashboard showing Database Response Times, Cache Response Times, and Garbage Collection information.

An overview dashboard was also created to assist with monitoring across the suite. The Dashboard has been split out to show Slow, Very Slow, and Error percentages along with Average Response Times and Call Volumes for each application. Drilldowns were also added to take the user directly to the respective application Flow Map. Using these dashboards, they can, at a glance, check the overall application health for the Atlassian products. This has helped them improve the quality of service and user experience.

The bank’s JIRA users now suffer from far fewer slowdowns, particularly during morning peaks when many hurried story updates are taking place in time for stand-ups! The DevOps team is also able to get a heads-up from AppDynamics when slowness starts to occur, rather than when performance has fallen off a cliff.

So if you’re looking for more effective ways to monitor your Atlassian products, give our AppDynamics team a call. We can develop and implement a customised solution for your business to help ensure your applications run smoothly and at peak performance.

Our team on the case

Our AppDynamics stories

Case Study: Australian Red Cross Blood Service enhances critical application performance

“We depend on technology to deliver essential services to our people and healthcare professionals around the country,” says Wayne Bolton, manager of Applications and Integration Services for the Blood Service. “If our applications are unavailable, slow or not performing as intended, we’re potentially impacting patient care. In this business, time is critical.”

Historically, the Blood Service tested and monitored its infrastructure and applications in a manual, siloed and time-consuming manner. Given the criticality of its services and the highly regulated industry it operates in, the Blood Service needed more insightful information about the quality, performance, and availability of its applications.

Today, the Blood Service has that insight. Over a period of time, it has adopted best practices to gain visibility into its critical business services and understand what its users are experiencing. This was achieved by taking an end-to-end lifecycle approach to optimising applications from pre-production through to post-production or day-to-day operations management. How? By using Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with HP Quality Center software and HP Functional Testing software in conjunction with HP Application Performance Management including HP LoadRunner software, HP SiteScope software, HP Business Process Monitor software, HP Business Service Management software and HP Diagnostics software.

Objective

Drive improvements in the quality, performance and availability of business-critical services

Approach

Engaged HP Platinum Partner JDS Australia to secure application delivery and perform validation services

IT improvements

  • Obtained single point of truth to for application validation records
  • Unified functional, performance and quality management
  • Gained operational efficiencies by migrating to a paperless testing environment
  • Enhanced the Blood Services’ reputation
  • Provided evidence of a code issue to the application vendor to ensure a timely fix

 

About the Red Cross Blood Service

The Australian Red Cross Blood Service (Blood Services) performs a critical role in Australia’s health system. It provides quality blood products, essential services
and leading-edge research to improve the lives of patients.

A non-profit organisation with more than 4,000 employees, the Blood Service must be ready to respond around the clock to deliver blood and search its extensive records for specialised requirements for particular patients. More than 520,000 Australians are blood donors across 120 collection sites every year.

The organisation’s infrastructure is comprised of a range of servers in two main sites and approximately 40 enterprise applications, of which the mission-critical National Blood Management System (NBMS) has the largest footprint with more than 3,000 users. The performance of its systems is, therefore, a top priority.

Industry

Health

Primary applications

  • ePROGESA (Blood management system)
  • Oracle eBusiness Suite (Financials and Procurement)
  • Chris 21 (Human Resources)
  • Genesys Call Centre Enterprise Software
  • Collection Site Reference Application (CSRA)
  • HP Application Lifecycle Management Solution
  • HP Application Performance Management Solution

Primary hardware

  • IBM P570
  • IBM Blades

Primary software

  • AIX
  • Linux
  • Windows® XP
  • HP Application Lifecycle Management including:
    • HP Quality Center Software
    • HP Functionality Testing Software
  • HP Application Performance Management including:
    • HP LoadRunner Software
    • HP Diagnostics Software
    • HP Business Service Management Software
    • HP Business Process Monitor Software
    • HP SiteScope Software

Regulatory compliance drives change

The catalyst came as a result of the need to be able to demonstrate the validation state of the NBMS to both internal and external auditors.

“In the beginning, we were looking for a solution that would allow us to better manage the validation of the National Blood Management System and meet our compliance obligations,” explains Bolton. “In the past, validations were performed on paper, needed considerable manpower and would often take months to complete. In 2006, we decided to do what we could to automate the process and began looking around for a suitable solution.

“We selected HP based on the solution’s deep functionality, automation capabilities, scalability potential and industry leadership.”

Partnering for success

Understanding that it could reach faster time to value with an implementation partner, the Blood Service engaged JDS Australia (JDS) to assist with the project.

An HP Platinum Partner and winner of coveted HP Software Solutions Partner Excellence Awards for six consecutive years, JDS is regarded as an expert in the field of software testing, application/infrastructure monitoring and service management.

JDS believes that for most organisations getting a partner on-board takes the risks out of deployment and maximises return on software investment. “For the Blood Service, leveraging specialist services from JDS has really paid off. It allowed the organisation to focus on core competencies and strategic direction, while we managed testing and monitoring execution. It also brought something else – a roadmap for the future.”

“Embarking on this project without JDS would have been a difficult, if not an impossible undertaking,” explains Bolton. “With their assistance, we were up and running on HP Quality Center very quickly and had standardised on a central quality platform. We were managing and controlling software requirements and test cases with relative ease. Not long after this, we implemented HP Functional Testing and began functional and regression testing of more than 70 percent of our core business processes.

“For the first time in our history, we had a single source of truth for our testing assets and could much more easily demonstrate our validation efforts to internal and external audit. Our people could go to a central location to access, manage and reuse test cases.

“We gained operational efficiencies by migrating to a paperless testing environment and achieved real-time visibility into our validation progress. Overall, HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) unified functional, performance and quality management. It increased visibility and enabled us to better align business and technology requirements.“

Today, there are numerous examples where the Blood Service is realising benefits. “For instance, we can now run execution reports on the validation scripts on our blood manufacturing application in 30 minutes, rather than perhaps spending days recalling paper records from off-site storage,” adds Bolton.

“In addition, when we encountered an issue with HP Functional Testing not recognising a certain JAVA class, we asked JDS for help. They collaborated closely with the HP R&D team and within three weeks a global patch was released. This would not have been possible without the high-level relationship JDS has with HP.”

Broadening the HP horizon

Getting results on the board quickly with quality and compliance management paved the way for the next phase of evolution with HP and JDS. The Blood Service decided to upgrade its NBMS to take advantage of significant technical enhancements.

This third-party application, known as ePROGESA, is used by many blood banks around the world. Yet the Blood Service was cautious in its approach towards the upgrade as it was such a major undertaking and others had experienced issues.

“If we were going to execute this upgrade successfully, it became clear that we needed performance testing,” says Bolton. “We were transitioning from a green-screen application that was not scalable to a new n-tier J2EE environment. It was not a trivial matter and we needed to ensure it would perform as intended when launched.”

Once again, the Blood Service engaged JDS. This time, it was to validate system performance prior to going live on ePROGESA and ensure the vendor was meeting its contractual obligations. JDS leveraged Application Performance Lifecycle solutions including HP LoadRunner to emulate predicted loads and HP LoadRunner Diagnostics to deep-dive into the detail. HP SiteScope was also used to correlate infrastructure metrics while the system was under load.

Bolton says the project was unusually complex, “We were working with three different suppliers - one was responsible for the infrastructure, another handled the application and JDS was looking after performance testing. It made for an interesting working relationship, because we had to marry input from three sources prior to going live.”

Predicting and proving system behaviour

“During this time, we had a situation where ePROGESA was simply not performing as intended,” says Bolton. “After evaluating a range of possibilities, we threw more memory at it. When this didn’t yield any results, we began to suspect there could be a bottleneck in the application’s code.”

“When discussing this with JDS, we again turned to HP for answers. We needed to have a detailed look at the problem. Within hours, JDS had isolated the specific line of code that was causing the problem.”

JDS explains, “We used HP LoadRunner in conjunction with HP LoadRunner Diagnostics to deep-dive into the detail and independently ascertain that the performance issues experienced were indeed code-related. It was the silver bullet the Blood Service needed and a patch for ePROGESA was issued.”

Subsequent performance testing and tuning allowed the Blood Service to meet its objectives and deliver response times that were acceptable to the business.

“This gave us the confidence to go live,” says Bolton. “The beauty of HP LoadRunner is that you can draw a line in the sand to benchmark performance and correlate this to what is happening on the hardware. By using it alongside HP LoadRunner diagnostics, you can access all the detailed information you need. This was incredibly valuable and the insight obtained helped us make informed decisions about the readiness of ePROGESA and minimise the risks.”

Monitoring end-user behaviour

Next on the Blood Service’s agenda was enterprise-grade production monitoring. JDS recommended HP Business Service Management (BSM) and associated tools including HP SiteScope, HP Business Process Monitor (BPM) and HP Diagnostics.

These tools were complemented with HP BPM transactions to synthetically gauge end-user performance and availability across its distributed locations and learn of potential issues before end-users were impacted.
Within a short period of deploying these solutions, the Blood Service realised significant operational benefits. “We quickly had evidence to show the business that we were meeting the ePROGESA service levels of 99.98 percent availability,” says Tony Oosterbeek, Acting ICT manager. “Actual response times on business transactions were being met, and in fact, far exceeding expectations. We had an early warning system to resolve issues before our users were impacted. More importantly, we had complete traceability between the performance and availability our end-users experienced.”

Since then, the Blood Service has adopted this same proactive approach to address system availability for other applications including its Collection Site Reference Application – an in-house system used by its national call centre. “Recently, we needed to find out if the application could scale up from 100 to 135 users,” explains Brett Renton, IS Acting operations manager. “HP LoadRunner was put to work and we quickly determined that the user breakpoint would be 180 people. This gave us the confidence we needed to go ahead.”

“Another example of the benefits we are realising with HP Business Service Management (BSM) is with our Oracle™ Financials suite. After we decided to upgrade the software, hardware and database elements to improve performance, we leveraged HP Business Process Monitor (BPM) to better understand the timing issues around business transactions and used this data to justify the cost of the upgrade. It was a really good way to make a clear business case and the results speak for themselves. We now proactively know exactly what our end users are experiencing and can detect any performance or availability issues across all key geographic locations”.

Business Benefits

  • Improved ability to meet regulatory audits by access to validation data in hours rather than days or weeks
  • Achieved availability of 99.8 percent for National Blood Management System (NBMS)
  • Achieved proactive end-user visibility of business transaction times for Oracles™ Financials application
  • Mitigated risks of deploying applications in critical functions

Solid future

Adopting a lifecycle approach to quality, performance and availability of key business applications has enhanced the Blood Services’ capability.

There is now a focus on extending the discipline of validation to other systems, “Although we’ve improved processes in areas including requirements, testing and performance, the greatest outcome is that we have brought all these best practices together. This combination provides collaborative processes and analysis capabilities for traceability and consistent reporting across the lifecycle. It has brought the organisation to a common place that allows us to achieve governance, compliance and accountability at a lower risk.”

“Thanks to HP and JDS, we’ve realised the full advantages of adopting a lifecycle management approach to managing our applications – from testing, through to pre-production through to go-live. We’ve mitigated risks, ensured quality and delivered more responsive, stable services to support our users and the organisations mission to improve the lives of patients,” says Bolton.

Case Study: Superpartners optimises IT operations with HP and JDS

With a mission to achieve efficiency and effectiveness through operational excellence, Superpartners sought to strengthen the end-user experience by gaining greater visibility into its IT infrastructure. The company turned to HP and adopted a Business Technology Optimization (BTO) approach to optimize the availability, performance and effectiveness of its business services and applications with HP Business Availability Center software.

Objective

To try and maximise the end-user experience, Superpartners sought to proactively monitor IT availability and performance

Approach

Superpartners adopted an HP Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) strategy with HP Business Availability Center software as the centrepiece in its application management strategy

IT improvements

  • Problems isolated, and issues resolved efficiently and effectively
  • Increased the quality of services to the business, its customers and employees
  • Better understanding of the complexities and interdependencies of the IT infrastructure including networks, systems and applications
  • Improved SLA compliance and reduced exposure to risk

About Superpartners

Superpartners is one of the largest superannuation administrators in Australia, employing over 1,500 people in eight offices Australia-wide. The company services about 6 million member accounts, 667,000 employer accounts and has over $72 billion in funds under administration.

Recognising that technology is a key enabler of its success, Superpartners develops core applications in-house, and sources third party products and services that complement its offering. Operating a business on considerable scale and complexity, the company has embraced a service-oriented technology strategy with business efficiency and service delivery as its focal points.

Industry

Superannuation

Taking a Proactive Approach and Gaining End-to-End Visibility

In supporting such a large user base, Superpartners is keenly focused on ensuring its business processes and technology operations deliver value to the business. Prior to implementing HP Business Availability Center, the company had outsourced monitoring of its infrastructure, which proved limiting. And with the growth of the organisation’s application portfolio, the need to comprehensively and proactively monitor the health of its systems became increasingly apparent.

Gary Evans, Chief Information Officer, Superpartners explains, “We needed to gain a better understanding of our environment and we wanted to become proactive and respond more effectively to incidents. The early warning systems that we had in place just weren’t enough. We also wanted a more accurate way to determine if we were meeting our Service Level Agreements. Put simply, we needed a comprehensive application management solution and HP Business Availability Center met our requirements.”

Partnering to Fast-Track Time to Benefit

To facilitate deployment, Superpartners engaged HP Business Partner, JDS Australia, experts in software testing and monitoring with HP solutions. JDS provided specialist services in application monitoring to help Superpartner realise value from its HP investment. Steve Smith, General Manager (Victoria) JDS says, “Superpartners was quick to recognise the benefits of application monitoring, particularly in terms of enhancing their end-user services. In a matter of weeks they were monitoring the availability and performance of their application, and gaining true end-to-end visibility into what was happening behind the scenes. By having access to vital and detailed information about their systems, they can now be appraised of issues ten minutes before their end-users experience an outage, and begin resolution.

“Overall, Superpartners is realising the benefits of proactive visibility and access to a consolidated end-user and infrastructural view of their application performance. They have achieved much improved SLA compliance and have considerably reduced risk. We are delighted with the outcome and believe that the collaborative approach we established with Superpartners is the key to success.”

 

Fast Resolution of Problems, Productivity Gains, and Reduced Risks

A comprehensive business application management solution, HP Business Availability Center has allowed Superpartners to monitor the health of its systems. Specifically, the organisation is keeping a close eye on the end-user experience, continuously isolating problems and assessing the status of key services and applications.

Gary explains, “HP Business Availability Center has enabled us to see the actual performance of our systems as experienced by our customers. It provides us with an early warning system and we can drill down to the transaction level to examine potential issues. We now have the ability to pinpoint exactly where a problem might be and potentially fix it before our end-users experience degradation in our systems.

“In addition, HP Business Availability Center has helped us better understand the complexities and interdependencies of our IT infrastructure including networks, systems and applications. In turn, this provides us with the information we need to diagnose, isolate and fix problems quickly to maintain business continuity. As a result, we have improved the quality of our services and are benefiting from increased productivity by having the ability to concentrate resources where needed and by achieving quicker resolution time. We have also enhanced SLA compliance and we can now report on both infrastructure and application availability. Finally, the synthetic monitoring that HP Business Availability provides reduces our application deployment risk and we have gained confidence that our applications will perform as intended.”

Business Benefits

  • Improvements to the performance and availability of Superpartners’ IT Infrastructure and Applications
  • Association with JDS Australia delivered fast time to value
  • Gained true end-to-end visibility of its systems to improve the end-user experience
  • Improved service quality, increased productivity and gained confidence in the availability and performance of its applications.
  • Operational efficiencies, alignment of business and IT, and delivery of better governance

Better Governance and Future Plans

Today, Superpartners’ Technology team is able to undertake forward planning, proactive management and maintenance of its systems, instead of functioning in a reactionary state. This is delivering added benefits as the organisation’s business operations and future direction can be fully supported by a high-performing technology infrastructure, capable of adapting to market changes.

Gary elaborates, “We are yet to capitalize on the full potential of HP Business Availability Center. We still have additional functionality and capabilities to leverage to further optimize our systems, but we’re now in a strong position to react and fix issues quickly. Not only are we also enabling a much more efficient environment, but we are delivering better governance, particularly around our SLAs.”

Looking to the future, we are aiming to ensure HP Business Availability Center is rolled out across all our application environments. This will enable us to gain true alignment between our monitoring capabilities and our user experience, to achieve end-to-end optimization of our services and applications.”

On the whole, HP Business Availability Center is enabling Superpartners to manage and optimise the quality, performance and effectiveness of its business services and applications.

Completing the APM picture with AppDynamics EUM

How are your customers really experiencing your apps right now? How is your business reputation, loyalty and revenue being affected by the world between your application servers and your customer? AppDynamics End User Monitoring (EUM) completes the APM picture by letting you See, Act on, and Know about your customers' real experiences in real time.

With EUM, AppDynamics extends the valuable insights it provides by tracing all the way out to the browser or mobile app giving complete end-to-end visibility for every customer experience.

Watch this session to learn:

  • Why you need to understand the full customer experience on top of what is happening in your data centre.
  • The customer experience metrics that matter most.
  • How AppDynamics EUM gives visibility of the complete picture from your customer's devices to and through your backend APIs and applications.
  • How EUM Synthetics further helps you to Know at all times that your apps are working at their best.

Discover exactly how your end users experience and engage with your applications.