NECA Delivers 99.9% System Uptime Using Applications Manager
The National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA) is a not-for-profit organization established by the Federal Communications Commissions to help deliver telecommunication and broadband services to rural consumers. It ensures that the services remain available and affordable across the United States. It also provides expert services in industry database management, economic forecasting, trend analysis, and regulatory policy analysis.
NECA's business IT infrastructure consists of numerous web servers, services and applications. The web applications are used by both external and internal users to submit crucial data on a daily basis. The websites are also used by member companies to submit monthly reports to obtain funding approvals. To ensure hassle-free user experiences, the websites and web applications need to stay secure and up-to-date with valid SSL certificates.
From a business perspective, it was imperative for NECA's system administrators to ensure smooth business operations. This involved tedious, manual monitoring of websites and applications, tracking system resource use, and managing SSL certificates. It was important for NECA to be notified about critical issues to avoid performance degradations that hampered IT operations. The hybrid nature of the infrastructure made it difficult for them to discover the root cause of issues, and prevent unexpected service unavailability.
NECA was looking for an all-in-one application performance monitoring solution that would help it steer it through challenges by delivering end-to-end visibility into its IT infrastructure.
The team at NECA came across Applications Manager while doing online research on monitoring tools. They found that the product received great online reviews, and good ratings for technical support and service. This led them to evaluate Applications Manager in their environment.
During their evaluation phase, the NECA team tested the full functionality of Applications Manager. They found that the solution made it possible to monitor all services and web applications running on web servers and workstations in detail. They were originally using Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager but soon found that Applications Manager provided deeper visibility into their performance and their users' experiences.
They were also impressed by Applications Manager's user-friendly interface and permission controls.
"Applications Manager has a more user-friendly interface and more delicate permission controls than other products in the market.Ó
These factors helped the NECA team select Applications Manager as their application monitoring solution.
After deploying Applications Manager, the NECA team saw that it facilitated and automated their processes and helped them gain a holistic view into the overall performance of their infrastructure. They use Applications Manager to monitor numerous PCs, workstations, and Windows Virtual Desktops on Azure on a daily basis at offices located in St. Louis; Omaha, Neb.; Denver; Atlanta; and Morristown, N.J.
As a unified monitoring solution, Applications Manager helps NECA:
"Applications Manager is a system administrator's best friend. By using Applications Manager as a real-time monitoring tool, we are now able to support service level agreement of 99.9% system uptime to the public."
Applications Manager notifies the NECA system admins of anomalies, enables faster troubleshooting through root cause analysis, and ensures reduced mean time to repair.
For more information, visit www.manageengine.com/appmanager
It allows us to track crucial metrics such as response times, resource utilization, error rates, and transaction performance. The real-time monitoring alerts promptly notify us of any issues or anomalies, enabling us to take immediate action.
Reviewer Role: Research and Development
Tech Support Manager, Lexmark