Cloud Monitoring: An Interview With An E-ticketing Vertical Based In North America

Can you briefly describe your role and your IT organization

?

We built our own software in-house and maintain it in our own data center. We dont use someone elses resources, like Amazon. And we get a lot of traffic and its a business-critical application! Im in the Site Operations Center, and the role of the Operations Center is front-line monitoring for our site. We pretty much deal with everything except the database, which is managed by a different group for PCI and SOX compliance. We troubleshoot and then for the most part we also resolve issues. If its something out of our scope or skills, we escalate up to higher-level experts.

How are you using Keynote?

I used Keynote in a prior environment. I knew how flexible and powerful it could be. So I brought it into our current data center where I had been using another, third-party monitoring solution.

We leverage Keynote to help us manage our application and its interdependencies end-to-end. With Cloud Transaction Perspective we can test inside the data center as well as outside. It helps us to complete the picture we need to do our jobs better. You know our Operations Center is kind of like the Emergency Room at a hospital so we dont have a lot of time to find problems. So I wanted it for the speed it can deliver in isolating problem areas across the application and its infrastructure very quickly: Is it an application issue? Or is it an internet issue? Or is it internal to the data center? Or the clients network? Or a carrier problem? Or specific to one of the points of presence? There are so many segments that can impact our business and Keynote steers us right away to the right segment.

How would you describe Keynotes benefits beyond speed in problem isolation for critical applications?

Well, speed in resolving problems brings multiple benefitsin terms of revenue associated with uptime versus downtime, as well as operational efficiencies. So pretty quickly you can make more money in opex and business generated than you will have spent in Keynote services.

I also like Keynote reports when it comes to working with other groups. For instance, our developers make a change in application code all the time. Every week,and sometimes every few days. So Keynotes data and reports help us coordinate to see what the impacts of those changes are with other teams like product development and engineering. If theres a performance issue after an application update we can send the information back to the engineers in development to help analyze the problem. You know that if for the whole week your response time is three seconds, then you had a new deployment and it now goes to 5.5 seconds something definitely went wrong.

What else do you like about Cloud Transaction Perspective?

Were using Cloud Transaction Perspective with Transaction Perspective 11 so we can see the real user experience versus just an approximation. We have granular insight into what our actual users will experience, for instance in terms of time to paint the page. It also helps to improve a lot of our third-party interdependencies.

Overall I would summarize the values this way:

Troubleshooting

MTTR reducing an outage,

Improving performance with engineering and product and developers,

Improving the user experience which means more money for our company,

Better support for business stakeholders and business development because the data and reports are very easy to understand. They can look for behavioral patterns and relate that to what we see and do in operations. You can leverage any waterfall or other graphic data on the page and create a report for someone who isnt technical to understand the impact.

Do you have anything else to add?

Keynote developers have been very responsive to our requests when it comes to functional or other needs. And Keynote support is very strong. Ive had situations where Ive had a good product with bad support and ended up hating it. The bottom line with Keynote is that they really do care about their customers. Its all about trust. Not just I sold you the product and I dont want to see you anymore. This is an important element in any software investment. And you know, what it means for me personally? Im meeting my numbers, and thats definitely a good thing!

by: Keynote

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