November 1, 2007

Sometimes our customers come to us for tailored solutions to meet a specific need. Recently I got a call from one of our customers who wanted to be alerted when their servers were rebooting, so they can track the times at which reboots are occurring. Although Longitude does detect servers that are down, there are cases in any interval-based monitoring situation where a server can reboot without being caught because it is not down long enough to warrant the trigger of a “server down” alert. However, in this case, the customer needed to know about every single reboot on their Windows and Unix servers, even reboots that cause only momentary interruptions.

First we helped them deploy a custom solution for Windows that reads a value in WMI and creates an event whenever a reboot occurs. At each interval it checks the reboot time and compares it to what it observed in the previous interval. If there is a difference in value, Longitude knows there was a reboot and sends the alert.

Unix doesn’t give us anything as easy as a WMI value, but it’s still simple. For their Unix servers we created a Unix_Script Transaction that runs the following command: cut –d” “ –f1 /proc/uptime

The command is able to detect when a Unix server has been up for less than 900 seconds, and generate an event just as on Windows.

With these simple solutions, they are now able to track reboots on both types of servers.

Posted by Alison Murphy, Senior Technical Support Engineer

October 19, 2007

Many of our Longitude customers support clients conducting e-commerce business. IT groups at these companies face serious pressure to keep networks and applications running at peak efficiency. If problems arise it can mean less than acceptable service levels and subsequently the loss of significant revenue for their clients. They turn to Longitude’s application performance and network monitoring to help them avoid these issues.

We recently spent some time talking with one our clients supporting e-commerce customers, Hanover Direct. They shared with us the ways in which Longitude helps them achieve optimal business performance. Hanover Direct is a provider of quality, branded merchandise through a portfolio of catalogs and e-commerce platforms and their clients include Domestications, The Company Store, and Company Kids, whose e-commerce sites receive more than eight million web site hits per day.

According to systems administrator, Jason Valli, his IT group needs to make sure that their IT infrastructure can meet changing user volumes and transaction requirements. Heroix Longitude’s customized real-time dashboards, reports, alerts, user experience monitoring, and SLA capabilities enable them to consistently have a clear view of how systems are functioning. They can fix issues quickly should they occur and in many cases are able to avoid problems before they ever affect business.

Valli told us that with Longitude they no longer have to wade through reams of event data to understand what is happening if an issue does arise. He said “We have automated the mundane tasks affiliated with monitoring our web servers, disk space, CPU utilization, events, and trend reporting and can at any point identify what is happening throughout our IT environment. We now have constant access to the intelligence necessary to easily isolate the root source of the problems.”

Without the worry of network or application issues affecting their customers’ business, Hanover Direct can assure that their clients don’t lose money due to network or system downtime. This allows them to confidently provide the highest quality IT service to their clients. Heroix is proud to help them provide this level of service.

Posted by Rick Lane, President

September 12, 2007

Recently, one of our clients asked us how to shorten event email alerts for display on their administrators’ handheld devices. Since most of their administrators are spending less time at their desks and more time in the field, it made more sense for the alerts to be customized for reading from these devices. I walked them through the process of editing the XML files in the Longitude installation directory for this specific use. But customers can also easily edit the text of alerts by using Longitude’s correlated events function and creating an event with their own text without having to do any coding.

This got me thinking about how well-suited the User Interface is to all kinds of changes in the workforce. More employees are checking email from a BlackBerry® and other handheld devices, and more and more companies allow their employees to work from home to allow for flexibility with hours, commuting and family needs. The User Interface in Longitude – which requires no ActiveX controls, plug-ins or applets – is perfectly suited for these types of flexible work environments because it allows clients to securely login to Longitude from anywhere a user has Internet access, including from home or even at an Internet café.

Many workplaces are adaptable to their workers’ schedules and it’s important that monitoring software be just as adaptable. Take this scenario: You’re on your way home from work and just as you’re pulling into your driveway your handheld beeps and displays an alert that something is wrong on your company’s network. No need to go all the way back to work to fix the problem, you can simply login to the Longitude User Interface from your home computer and proceed as you would from the office. And you’re doing all this all without having to write any code.

Posted by: Greg Savas, Technical Support Consultant

August 29, 2007

We recently conducted a survey of our Longitude customers with the help of third party industry experts Ptak, Noel and Associates, LLC. Respondents participated in either an online survey or a phone interview with a PNA analyst.

The findings were quite interesting but two main points really stood out. The first were the reasons why our customers chose Longitude and the second was the fact that proactive monitoring is still a top priority among IT professionals.

More than half of our responding customers said that they chose Longitude for its ease of use and cost-effectiveness. The customers were also asked about the time it took to deploy Longitude. Half of them said it took mere minutes and another quarter of our customers said it took only hours. Those are pretty significant statements about our product because they show how important some of our best features – quick deployment without the cost of individual agents – are to customers.

The survey also revealed that among the priorities of IT organizations, of top concern was the need to be proactive. About three-quarters of the respondents said that the inability to detect service problems within their organization was concerning because of the time spent trying to find problems after they occurred. But after deploying Longitude, most said that in less than one month they were able to find problems before they received user complaints and many of them actually saw those benefits within two weeks.

So what is this survey really telling us? In the words of one of our clients – an electronics manufacturing company – after deploying Longitude, “typical service issues that used to take days to resolve were now being cleared within hours,” saving them critical IT manpower and ultimately helping the bottom line. This clearly shows the need for, and advantages of, proactive monitoring. If our customers are telling us that our product is easy to use, cost-effective and can find problems before they affect business processes then I think we are meeting demands in the IT world. The survey illustrates that Longitude allows IT to focus on other things, like strategic organizational objectives, rather than on constantly finding and fixing problems after they’ve occurred. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

See the full results of our survey by visiting http://www.ptaknoelassociates.com/CSS/Heroix/index.html

July 26, 2007

One of our newer clients, Access Enterprise Solutions, recently shared their reasons for choosing Longitude. AES is a remote support services provider that delivers targeted business and technology solutions for ERP services, strategy and program oversight, staff augmentation, and selective outsourcing for database, operating system, and application support.

According to their Director of Outsourcing, Michael Hillenbrand, AES was looking for an application performance and network monitoring solution that met a long list of criteria to support their customers.

Specifically, they needed a product that met these conditions:

• It had to be agentless (no software to install on the customer servers).
• It needed to provide the alerts they would need to proactively administer the databases.
• It must support what they support (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL)
• It needed to provide customizable SLA event and reporting capabilities.
• It must work out of the box with little or no configuration necessary.
• It needed to monitor the operating systems (Unix, Linux, and Windows)
• It must have a pricing model conducive to their support model.

“We were surprised how easy it was to make our decision to buy Longitude,” Hillenbrand said. “No other product could meet all of our monitoring needs while also meeting the pricing structure we needed for the software.”

One of the AES database administrators, Shawn Gramby, noted that in the short time since deploying Longitude on their Oracle database, they are impressed with how well the statistics in Longitude match those coming from Oracle. “That would be the last thing I would want to worry about,” says Gramby. “With Longitude there is no reason to worry. The stats are refreshed in real time, and all of the metrics tracked via Longitude are up-to-the-second accurate and there is no lag in the refresh time. When a database administrator couples this with Longitude’s ability to send an e-mail at the first sign of a problem, what you have is the ability to respond quickly to space issues, file statuses, and potentially harmful wait events. All of this bundled into one tool which costs significantly less than it would to implement via Oracle, with no scripts running in the scheduler or cron.”

Hillenbrand and Gramby will check back with us this fall to let us know more how Longitude has changed the way AES does business. I look forward to hearing about their progress.

Posted by: Rick Lane, Heroix President