Last week, I was visiting with a customer, and they were sharing a common problem. An end user calls and says, "our application is slow." Their challenge is familiar to many customers I've met.
First, the question that arises is "how slow is slow?" Is it slower than yesterday? How much slower? A little slower? A lot slower? And, what specifically is causing the slow down?
This customer’s response, which is all too familiar, includes an "all hands on deck" approach to performance management. Multiple resources start looking into a wide array of tools and dissecting discrete components of the infrastructure. This "bottom up" approach takes significant resources and correlation of data to determine IT performance. But even if they implement improvements, the quantifiable effect on end-user performance is unknown.
This was a common theme with our customers. As a result, we launched Datalink's managed monitoring service, which provides a better way to approach this challenge. Our service provides a "top down" approach to measure the end-user performance. Using synthetic transactions, or "end-to-end" monitoring, we rapidly implement scripts that measure performance and availability on an consistent basis. IT gains visibility into a quantifiable baseline, trending, and service levels of actual "end-user performance." IT also gains insight to drill down into specific areas where variances or errors from the baseline occur. Thus, saving operational resources while quickly restoring services levels to normal. In the end, we want to help “IT look good!”