EBSCO Publishing on Coradiant
“TrueSight is saving me a day a week, and I’m able to do extra tasks that are helping our business .”
-- Sandy Barry, Director of Database Services, EBSCO Publishing
Customer Profile - EBSCO Publishing is the worldwide
leader in managing full text and
bibliographic databases for libraries
worldwide. By offering library users
access to more than 300 unique
reference sources – secondary
databases, full-text databases and
current journal subscriptions such as
Business Week, New England Journal
of Medicine, Consumer Reports and
Harvard Business Review – the
company enables publishers to receive
high exposure for their content.
Vendor Profile - Coradiant is the leading provider of equipment used to manage, optimize and troubleshoot web applications. Coradiant's award-winning TrueSight™ products use customer metrics gathered from each web user visit as their primary data source for IT management. Coradiant products are deployed in hundreds of leading Fortune 500 companies including software as a service (SaaS), e-commerce, entertainment, finance, insurance, healthcare, and education. Coradiant is headquartered in San Diego.
CHALLENGE
EBSCO needed real-time visibility of all library users accessing EBSCOhost to speed up isolation and repair of performance errors.
WHY END-USER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT?
EBSCO Publishing wanted to observe all its users across the globe instead of relying on guesswork to solve end-user performance issues.
SOLUTION
EBSCO selected Coradiant TrueSight IM, a solution that proactivly measures performance levels of every library user for faster problem diagnoses.
KEY BENEFITS
- Improved customer service levels by quickly identifying and solving performance problems.
- Saved thousands of dollars in ongoing infrastructure costs by eliminating ineffective system monitoring tools.
- Increased employee productivity through easy access to real-user performance data for accelerating problem resolution.
EBSCO PUBLISHING ENSURES FAST, RELIABLE CONTENT DELIVERY TO LIBRARIES WORLDWIDE
EBSCO Publishing is the worldwide leader in managing full text and bibliographic databases for libraries worldwide. EBSCO Publishing must keep a watchful eye on its information delivery for potential problems impacting end users. And it must quickly investigate and diagnose performance problems inside and outside its network to better service its customers.
EBSCO Publishing created EBSCOhost, aWebbased reference application, to provide library users with immediate access to its databases. Content is fed into EBSCOhost as raw data from its original source or it is scanned in from printed publications. It may also be combined with other electronic resources stored in a library’s collection to create a one-stop research environment for users available via a computer or a networked library terminal. Each day EBSCOhost receives 80+ search requests per second from users located across the globe.
Like any complex Web system, database changes and search requests fluctuate continuously. To keep pace, EBSCO Publishing must keep a watchful eye on its system for potential problems impacting end users. And it must quickly investigate and diagnose performance problems inside and outside its network to better service its customers.
TRADITIONAL MONITORING SOLUTIONS MISS THE MARK
While EBSCO had used a traditional Web application monitoring tool and HP OpenView products for monitoring its Web system, the company was unable to measure EBSCOhost’s real-user performance. “We were flooded with statistics, but if you can’t make anything out of those statistics and apply them to any business or search delivery metrics, the data you’re generating is useless,” said Sandy Barry, director of database services at EBSCO Publishing. “And the previous solution just wasn’t cost effective. I had to continually justify the amount of hardware required, and it didn’t get past the CIO.”
To solve this problem, EBSCO selected Coradiant’s TrueSight End-User Experience Management equipment for complete visibility of all search requests and to pinpoint performance trends before they impact end users. In addition, TrueSight provided a cost-effective, monitoring solution for scaling hardware capacity to support its growing business.
According to Barry, even in the first two hours of the evaluation TrueSight stood out above the other products the company was considering. “We gave the system engineer a log-in and a simple scenario of how someone would use our product. All he did was look at the HTTP headers to figure out which pages to collect, and then created the Watchpoints. We were pretty impressed by what TrueSight provided. In comparison, we had put BeatBox in here at the same time and after 30 days we just couldn’t get it configured to collect anything useful.”
TAKING SEARCH TO NEW PERFORMANCE LEVELS
Using TrueSight’s Incident Management capabilities, EBSCO Publishing has opened new avenues to better customer service. “It is easy to measure search requests inside the company. But, what happens when that search is delivered to Indonesia, or Beijing, or South Africa and there is a slow down? It used to be really hard to diagnose our response time problems for customers in those locations. And I think prior to this, we would actually throw our hands up and say that it was their issue and they needed to work it out inside their company or with their network provider,” explained Barry.
“Now with TrueSight I set up a Watchpoint to monitor the traffic during the day. Many times I’ll pull that Watchpoint out and make a deep site report for a customer. The customer can then take this information back to the service provider and look at why there are network issues on the customer’s end, and not on ours.” And to improve application quality and reliability before deploying new products, EBSCO relies on TrueSight for identifying potential performance problems. Barry noted that TrueSight was instrumental in finding critical errors before the company launched its Web-based student resource center. “We did a two-week evaluation with 50 different customers,” said Barry. “TrueSight discovered a lot of performance issues and high host times on our end that we needed to look into.”
OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE RESULTS FOR GREATER EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY
For managing overall system performance, EBSCO configured TrueSight to monitor traffic on its 40 Web servers so the company can gain around-the-clock visibility of its business processes and easily capture relevant user metrics. Barry stated that this step ensures search requests are promptly served in less than three seconds – the company’s internal search response goal. By enabling immediate access to realtime data, TrueSight eliminates the time consuming task of sifting throughWeb log files to determine what is happening on the customer’s side.
“TrueSight is assisting in finding problems faster,” concluded Barry. “It helps me quickly diagnose response time or throughput issues very, very quickly. TrueSight is saving me a day a week, and I’m able to do extra tasks that are helping our business.”
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