Performance Guard™ Monitoring and Documentation for IT Governance

IT is often challenged with documenting how well delivered applications and services live up to expectations. With Performance Guard®, IT and business sponsors can use monitored information to deliver end-to-end documentation over time. Users can monitor how each service or group of services were delivered to the end-user – including setting thresholds and alerts if they are exceeded.

For many Performance Guard users, documenting performance combined with capacity planning and systems and application tuning, deliver pay-back in months, if not weeks.

Having a true end-to-end documentation of performance based on factual data of the users experience has proven a essential to having a proactive and meaningful dialogue between IT management and the business customers serviced by IT. It gives the base information to discuss delivered performance, where to improve performance and where to focus service levels going forward.

Application and Infrastructure Performance Tuning

Tuning performance of specific applications can be a long and challenging task that requires significant IT expertise. With Performance Guard™, the required skills to understand such complex installations are removed by giving an end-to-end view in which dials “to turn” to optimize the system. For example, a Performance Gaurd customer experienced significant performance problems with an application delivered from an outsourced vendor. Both the outsourcer and the network provider demonstrated their systems worked just fine. It was not until Performance Guard ™ was installed, that the customer could tell the application outsourcer that there was an issue with their connection to the WAN.

Another customer had a similar issue but in an internal Citrix installation. It was not until Performance Guard™ was brought in and demonstrated that an antivirus package was faulty and overburdened the infrastructure once per hour by trying to download a new profile, that the issue was resolved. Both cases had caused months of significant work trying to find the issues on both the customer and the vendor side. .They were solved in a few days with Performance Guard, leading to rapid return on investment – while removing significant pains that had crippled the IT organization for weeks.

Capacity Planning

Optimal capacity utilization has profound impact on IT infrastructure performance. There are always capacity constraints thus the hard question to answer is how to prioritate upgrades for maximum impact. End-user based IT management enables a clear end-to-end view of capacity constraints, a razor sharp cut of where the constraints have most impact on IT performance.

Standard reports include capacity constraint documentation that makes it easier to get insight into even very complex environments. In a recent case, a customer was unable to identify an ERP application performance issue to a set of remote offices including their European Headquarters. Upgrades of the network and servers had given little relief and it was severely impacting the business as orders were not entered in an orderly fashion. Within a few hours, Performance Guard identified the issue to be an improperly configured network access device ensuring the scheduled costly replacement of servers and their network provider was saved giving pay back of the investment in less than a week.

Performance Guard™ "One-Click" Issue Resolution

According to Forrester, nearly 75% of all issues reported by end-users are not visible in data center management solutions by the time they are reported into the helpdesk. Furthermore, the same research indicates that it takes an average of six calls to identify an owner of a given issue. Performance Guard™ will provide not only alerts as issues occur, but also granular information on what the root cause of the issues are dramatically cutting the time spent on issue resolution.

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