“NetQoS SuperAgent is the tool that has given our SLAs reporting credibility. Before SuperAgent, we had no level of performance granularity. We reported on the measures we had rather than on what was meaningful.”-- Richard White, CIO, MPS Group
Customer Profile - MPS Group (MPS) is a Fortune 1000 provider of staffing, consulting, and solutions in the disciplines of information technology, finance and accounting, law, engineering, and healthcare. MPS delivers its services to government entities and businesses in virtually all industries throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla., MPS trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “MPS.”
Vendor Profile - NetQoS software and services help service providers, government agencies, and large enterprises – including half of the Fortune 100 – improve the delivery of applications over wide area networks by enabling them to monitor application service levels, troubleshoot problems quickly, and plan for change. Representative NetQoS customers include Chevron, Lockheed Martin, American Express, Hilton Hotels, Siemens, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, NASA, and Barclays Global Investors. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NetQoS has R&D centers in Austin and Raleigh, N.C., and regional sales offices in London and Singapore.
MPS Challenges:
» Measure and report application performance for 10,000 employees and contractors in 200 U.S. offices
» Map the key applications to service levels
» Improve troubleshooting
NetQoS SuperAgent Benefits:
» Improved application service delivery
- Fast, detailed performance statistics
- Intelligent baselines
- Problem isolation to the network, server or application–without desktop or server agents
- Performance and availability service level agreement measurements
» Improved communication among IT groups
- Common tool to analyze the behavior of network, servers and applications
- More objectivity around drilling into issues
- Less finger-pointing between groups when problems occur
Challenge:
Personalizing IT Delivery and Measuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) Company-wide
The MPS Technical Services Group delivers business-critical applications and utility technology services to approximately 10,000 employees and contractors in 200 U.S. offices from its data center in Jacksonville, Fla. As an affiliation of companies with a distributed branch model, MPS wanted to personalize IT expectations for the different business units and locations, but had few tools in place to objectively measure and report performance.
According to MPS CIO Richard White, the goal is to let the business units know that “Technical Services is providing a consistent and required level of service and reacting quickly if something goes wrong.” MPS sought to mirror the real business experience location by location by mapping the key applications to service levels and measuring end-to-end response times. MPS put SLAs in place with the business units, but as of 2003 did not have comprehensive data to back them up. The company had no tool to adequately measure end-to-end performance and few alarms or alerting capabilities when service-level violations occurred. MPS used some scripts to measure service delivery, but the results were difficult to aggregate and results were not organized in a database. The company also used technology to synthetically poll Web sites and store response times but had no insight into middle- or multi-tier applications.
Solution: NetQoS SuperAgent®
When MPS' Technical Services Group tested NetQoS SuperAgent, the company found a tool that could measure end-to-end performance, monitor SLA compliance, gauge the impact of infrastructure changes, and assist in troubleshooting application performance problems for each of its locations in a cost-effective, non-intrusive manner.
SuperAgent separates response time into network, server, and application delay components, enabling rapid troubleshooting of performance bottlenecks. Automated processes measure and analyze application response time for all user transactions, compare the response time against intelligent baselines, then investigate the cause of problems as they occur. SuperAgent automatically gives the network and operations groups the key diagnostics needed to quickly solve performance problems. SuperAgent also reports both availability and application performance SLAs to document consistent levels of service quality for internal users and for external service providers.
For MPS, SuperAgent's agentless approach was a key factor in its decision to implement the product. SuperAgent works without desktop or server agents, avoiding a management nightmare for enterprises with tens of thousands of users. Instead, SuperAgent is connected to a mirrored switch port or network tap near the server farm and passively collects Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) packet header information from real application traffic. This deployment in the data center enables SuperAgent to measure and report on the experience of all end users when accessing key enterprise applications. MPS uses a distributed architecture with one SuperAgent console and four collectors. This passive monitoring approach adds no significant additional load to the network or application servers, so no bandwidth or processing power is
wasted just to measure application transactions. MPS was pleased that SuperAgent did not impose a high administrative burden on its Technical Services Group and that the product only took several hours to deploy.
Results: “A Tool That Gives the SLA Credibility”
Using NetQoS SuperAgent for SLA Measurement
Using SuperAgent, MPS now has visibility into its front and back office applications and can monitor and hone the SLAs in place with its internal as well as external customers. The company's external customers include the Fortune 500 clients of the Beeline business unit, which delivers workforce optimization applications via an ASP model to requisition temporary staff. Beeline is contractually obligated to deliver a high level of service to its clients, and SuperAgent gives the company the end-to-end metrics needed to document compliance levels.
Internally, MPS tracks approximately 14 applications with SuperAgent, including e-mail, enterprise database cluster, company intranet and portal, ERP platform (PeopleSoft), public Web sites, and several proprietary customer/client tracking applications. MPS documents network availability and performance for key applications (percent above or below availability and response time SLAs) for each business unit. For example, MPS' performance SLAs for key applications mandate that 80 percent of responses will be within 1.5 to 3.5-seconds, depending on the class of application. MPS appreciates the ability to change the SLA metric for each application as needed with SuperAgent. For instance, MPS has two different SLAs for its company portal: One for internal use and one for Web access.
SuperAgent also gives MPS the ability to easily run and deliver SLA reports via its Web-based user interface. MPS makes use of SuperAgent's dashboard, where green indicates good performance and red indicates bad performance, making it easy to show the directors and executives when application performance degrades. MPS' network engineer makes sure the reports are available and shows the management staff how to run reports at will. The Technical Services management team runs its own reports by going to SuperAgent's SLA operational detail, querying the application by region or type (each business unit is a region) and downloading a report in XML or CSV format. In addition, MPS distributes bimonthly SLA reports to the business unit presidents and corporate officers.
“NetQoS SuperAgent is the tool that has given our SLAs reporting credibility,” said CIO White. “Before SuperAgent, we had no level of performance granularity. We reported on the measures we had rather than on what was meaningful.”
Sample NetQoS SuperAgent Report Showing SLA Definitions and Results for Various Applications
Using NetQoS SuperAgent for Troubleshooting:
SuperAgent's automated troubleshooting features enable MPS to isolate application response time issues to the network, server or application and gather performance diagnostics automatically with filtered packet capture, SNMP polls, and trace routes. SuperAgent alerts MPS to performance degradations as they occur by providing simple, accurate, and timely reporting features. For example, on a Thursday evening, new Web content was published during MPS' IT maintenance window that caused a two-fold increase in Web server response time. On Friday morning, e-mail from SuperAgent was waiting in the mailboxes of the network engineer and the director diagnosing the front-end Web server as the affected system. The director was able to focus his efforts and the issue was resolved quickly, before users were seriously impacted. MPS also values SuperAgent's packet capture capability. When SuperAgent detects an application performance issue, it automatically collects a packet trace filtered for the affected applications and servers. When SuperAgent alerted MPS that a back-end database application was performing poorly, the network engineer checked the other applications by server and client region, and found that the Oracle server and all other applications were performing well. This information allowed the team to isolate a problem query and take corrective action.
“NetQoS SuperAgent helps us constantly improve by measuring our collective changes over time,” said Robert Daas, MPS Group Network Engineer. “The product tells us when we are moving in the right direction and shows when these efforts are paying off.”
Sample NetQoS SuperAgent Report Showing SLA Performance by Server for Web-External Application
According to MPS Group CIO White, NetQoS SuperAgent has provided two main benefits to MPS:
1) Performance: SuperAgent has made it easier for MPS to get branch and application level performance statistics with an unprecedented level of detail. The product makes it easier to identify exceptions and make corrections.
2) Process: Within the internal IT organization, SuperAgent has provided a common tool to analyze how the environment (network, servers and applications) is behaving. SuperAgent has taken away much of the guesswork, enabling the network, systems and application groups to dissect issues and pinpoint and solve the problems more easily and quickly. There is now more objectivity around drilling into issues and less finger pointing between groups when problems occur.
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