July 3, 2007

Longitude Creates Tailored Service Level Agreements for Critical, Custom Applications

Many of our customers use specially-designed applications to run critical portions of their businesses. Fallon Clinic – one of the largest private multi-specialty medical groups in Massachusetts with more than 240 physicians practicing in over 20 locations and more than 1 million patient visits per year – uses several applications customized for health care organizations from Epic Systems. Epic Systems’ applications help health care organizations with scheduling, managing patient records, and organizing patient care functions such as lab orders and test results. If an application is not functioning properly, the Fallon Clinic practices cannot effectively treat their patients and medical errors can occur.

Many IT organizations find custom applications difficult to monitor in that they require the cumbersome writing of scripts. With Longitude, companies can monitor their applications without the burden of writing scripts because the software is designed to examine the underlying infrastructure components that these specialty applications – such as those from Epic Systems – rely on.

Longitude provides the ability to create made-to-order service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure that Fallon Clinic, and other companies, can keep their critical multi-tiered applications functioning. Longitude’s SLA dashboard shows what percentage of the time the application was available, how the application is performing, and how performance of the overall application is related to the underlying infrastructure components. When problems occur, Longitude ensures IT staff recognize the root cause of outages and degradations in performance.

An SLA for a multi-tiered application might include service conditions to measure user experience (via a synthetic web transaction), memory, database availability, CPU utilization, and network bandwidth. Alternatively, an SLA may consist of only one metric; for example, a “Network Response” SLA might simply measure the response time of a ping request to another server on the network. Whenever an SLA changes state, Longitude generates an event that can be viewed in real time dashboards, historical reports, and can be used to notify IT staff or take corrective action.

At Fallon Clinic, Longitude monitors the performance of their Citrix servers that publish data from their Epic applications. Each time a member of the health care team logs onto one of the Epic applications, they are logging onto a user session. Fallon Clinic has set thresholds on the number of sessions that can be running at one time to keep the Epic application running. Separate thresholds also are set on the amount of memory being used to ensure the application runs smoothly. If either the number of sessions or the amount of memory being used goes above defined thresholds, key members of the IT team are alerted by email or page to avoid any problems with the application. Monitoring the statistics on the Citrix servers ensures that the Epic applications don’t slow down or become unavailable, which can lead to medical records getting lost or mixed up and can result in serious mistakes.

So what does this mean for Fallon Clinic and other clients using custom applications? It means that Longitude serves as a tailored monitoring product with custom SLA capabilities, without the hard work of writing scripts that is involved in monitoring a truly custom application. And because it’s agentless, Longitude can be easily applied to new machines as your company’s monitoring needs grow.

I invite you to take the flash tour of our agentless, multiplatform application performance and network monitoring software at http://www.heroix.com/downloads/flash/LongitudeTour/tour.asp

For more information about Service Level Agreements, view our data sheet at http://www.heroix.com/downloads/pdf/Longitude_SLA.pdf.

Posted by Alison Murphy, Senior Technical Support Engineer