|
Arrowsight Keeps an Eye on IT Performance and Ensures Customer Satisfaction with Heroix Longitude
When you are in the business of providing monitoring systems and services aimed at helping customers leverage their infrastructure investments, you need to be certain your own infrastructure is optimally performing. At Arrowsight, a Web-based Application Services Provider and leading developer of remote viewing services and software, the importance of sustaining a healthy IT environment is clearly understood.
With a client list that includes McDonald's franchisees, Limited Brands, Plumrose USA and Finish Line, Arrowsight is known for helping companies improve productivity, quality, and safety performance. Their remote video auditing products and services help clients transform video and related data into tools that enable security, operational, and marketing improvements - providing customers with greater control over business procedures, operational efficiencies, and ultimately their bottom line.
Helping clients improve their bottom line is not the only mission for Arrowsight. As their client base and IT infrastructure continually expands, staying ahead of IT performance problems is a constant challenge. "Given the nature of our business, sustaining an optimal IT environment is key," said Michael Hecht, IT Director at Arrowsight. "With so many of our servers and applications being production, client-facing touch points, optimal performance is not an option, it is a necessity. Poorly performing systems or applications can result in an interruption of services for our clients."
Monitoring: A Catalyst for Improving Business Performance
Retail establishments, restaurants, manufacturers, and financial institutions rely on Arrowsight's products and services to deter theft and fraud, manage inventory, monitor compliance activities, and audit production line efficiencies. Should one of Arrowsight's systems or applications go down, their clients can be at risk.
To help ensure the delivery of video feeds and audit reports, Arrowsight's diverse IT assets (including Linux and Windows servers, Exchange, SQL Server applications, DHCP, and Cisco routers) need to perform optimally. To ensure top IT performance, Arrowsight looked to Heroix and its agentless IT performance monitoring software, Longitude.
Using Longitude, Arrowsight is able to oversee the performance of the company's IT assets regardless of where the assets reside. Key IT performance metrics are continually monitored by Longitude, making it easy to identify performance issues before they impact operations - and customer confidence. Consolidated event and performance data reporting and comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) reports make it easy for Arrowsight to manage the effectiveness of all IT resources.
Improving Staff Efficiency and Customer Confidence
Arrowsight's technical support members no longer spend hours each day reviewing log and data files to identify and resolve IT performance problems. Instead they rely on Longitude's pre-defined and customizable reports which make it easy to measure and understand performance, utilization, and service level availability - key factors affecting Arrowsight's customers. When abnormal system behavior is identified, alarms and notifications are sent to the appropriate staff so corrective actions can be taken. Historical trend analysis makes it possible for Arrowsight to gain intelligence regarding optimal configurations for IT resources.
Like Heroix, Arrowsight provides its customers critical performance data. Arrowsight's customers rely upon the real-time, daily, weekly and monthly reports produced by Arrowsight to optimize operational processes. The reports capture a myriad of benchmarks and data points regarding issues surrounding compliance, safety, operational efficiency, customer service and inventory shrinkage. Without servers, applications, databases and networks performing properly, Arrowsight would not be able to capture and provide critical customer data, and customers would not be able to keep an effective eye on their business.
Longitude's agentless architecture was a perfect fit for Arrowsight's business model. The product's agentless architecture allows Arrowsight to add an IT resource to their list of monitored devices without having to bring any systems or applications down - and, no machine or application downtime means no disruption to user services. Additionally, system performance for machines located in the remote offices can be monitored. This was critically important for Arrowsight given their multi-site operations. Now with Longitude, systems, servers, and routers installed in their Huntsville, Alabama, Network Operations Center can routinely be monitored. With the help of Longitude, IT management can easily capture system performance data, regardless of where systems reside.
Getting the Most from IT Infrastructure Investments
Prior to deploying Longitude, Arrowsight had very little as far as automated IT monitoring procedures. When problems arose, Arrowsight's small IT support team had to go to multiple sources and wade through reams of information to try to figure out what went wrong, and then had to figure out how to isolate and fix the problem. Now, with Longitude, Arrowsight's IT team can effectively monitor all key business applications, servers, routers, databases and applications, and is provided with performance alerts before business users - and customers - are affected.
Additionally, Longitude's extensive performance reporting, comprehensive event monitor, real time dashboard, and SLA monitoring capabilities make it easy for Arrowsight to meet their complex IT management challenges. And, it is not only the IT team that relies on Longitude's performance reporting capabilities. Senior management throughout the organization find value in the IT reporting and graphing provided. Budgeting, business continuity, and utilization analysis can be done more effectively by drawing on the data Longitude produces. In short, Arrowsight is now better able to manage IT resources - and resource planning - to optimally meet service delivery requirements.
Small Price, Big Gains
Before investing in Heroix, Arrowsight assessed several of the leading IT performance monitoring software products but found Longitude best suited to meet their specific needs. Other products either carried a high price tag along with a complex learning curve, or were limited in functionality.
According to Hecht, the key benefits Arrowsight gains from using Longitude are:
- Improved customer service
- Optimized staff efficiency
- Enhanced resource allocation (in terms of people and IT assets)
- Maximized system uptime
- Enhanced responsiveness & lower time to resolution
"The proactive capabilities we get from Heroix are immense. If abnormal behavior is detected, we can see if there was a specific event or series of events that led up to the problem. Looking at a single console we can see clearly what is happening throughout our IT environment. And, with Longitude we even receive some guidance about how to best resolve a given problem. As a small shop, having access to this level of intelligence is critical. Heroix provides us big monitoring capabilities at a relatively inexpensive cost."
|
