| America’s final frontier
on the forefront of technology
The University of Alaska in Fairbanks is home to more
than 17,000 students and thousands of faculty and staff
members. Although situated in America’s last frontier,
set among pristine mountains and lakes, the University
of Alaska is on the cutting edge of technology. They
are currently using approximately 80 servers to mange
many of the university’s applications and web
services. The health of these servers affects customers’
(students and staff) ability to complete vital activities
such as registering for classes, accessing grades, paying
and processing fees, and using other important departmental
and enterprise applications. The servers are also responsible
for many of the human resources functions of the university,
including payroll. To ensure that customers are able
to access the resources they need to conduct their daily
activities, Information Systems at the University of
Alaska turns to Heroix Longitude, the agentless application
performance and network monitoring software.
Longitude helps organizations get ahead of
the curve
Information Systems at the University first came to
Longitude because they needed the ability to be proactive
in their monitoring strategies. They were getting complaints
from end users that transactions were slow and that
there were connectivity issues. They were also facing
problems involving hung processes that consumed large
amounts of CPU time. As a result, critical applications
– such as payroll – were impacted.
After deploying Longitude, they were able to run reports
and setup display graphs that enabled Information Systems
to watch network input/output and CPU intensive processes,
in addition to checking if the servers were up and responding.
This allowed them to proactively find any problems and
avoid any impact on services. It also enabled them to
pinpoint the amount of network traffic coming in and
out of the servers. They could then view historical
graphs to look and see how things were running both
when they did and didn’t receive complaints about
the servers. With Longitude, they gained the ability
to find problems before they impacted their end users
and are able to maintain the IT department’s reputation
for providing high quality service.
“We were already using two other monitoring products
but needed to find something to alert us to problems
before they happened – something the two products
in use weren’t capable of doing,” says Ricky
King, a Manager in the Information Systems Department
responsible for the Windows Servers. “Longitude
was the perfect solution. We can tell it to monitor
several aspects of our servers and transactions without
having to write a special script to do it. With Longitude
we just point and click to choose what we want to monitor
and it’s done.”
Proactive monitoring gets Information Systems
high marks
Since installing Longitude, Information Systems at the
University has seen an increase in its ability to prevent
system problems. They’ve also enhanced their ability
to fix problems before end users know they are happening.
According to King, several times Longitude has identified
server storage issues and provided trending analyses.
This allowed his department to take proactive measures
to ensure they didn’t run out of storage space
for critical data files. Longitude also keeps an eye
on important departmental services by monitoring the
supporting processes and transactions. For example,
Longitude has alerted King’s staff to problems
with a ColdFusion process that provides the back end
for an important departmental home page.
With limited resources, IS can show top performance
In these times of limited budgets and staff, plus the
growing practice of outsourcing IT/IS, departments need
to prove their value to the organization. The University
of Alaska likes Longitude’s ability to easily
publish data using the reporting portal – allowing
them to show other departments within the University
how well they are performing.
Longitude provides high returns for a small
investment
“We liked Longitude for its scalability, flexibility
and its price,” says King. Educational institutions
like the University of Alaska as well as many profit
and non-profit organizations are faced with budget constraints
and lean staff. According to King, Longitude offered
them the best return on their investment without using
valuable manpower.
Dedicated to service
King also gives high marks to Heroix’s commitment
to customer service. While being in a different time
zone often creates challenges for the University, King
was pleasantly surprised to find that wasn’t the
case with Heroix. “It’s amazing how easy
it is to work with the Longitude support staff despite
the fact that we are in Alaska and there is a four-hour
time difference between our offices and Heroix in Massachusetts.
They accommodate our schedule to make sure that the
product is running smoothly. That says a lot about how
much they value their customers and how much faith they
put in what Longitude can do.”
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