Case Study : Applications Manager helps SaaS Office Suite Ensure Good User Experience

Zoho's Objective:

Zoho is an online office productivity and collaboration suite. They provide SaaS applications for Enterprises and consumers and target a global audience. These SaaS applications are critical for their customers. Hence the Zoho Operations Team needs to ensure 24x7 availability and performance for these applications.

Since the nature of business includes targeting consumers, SOHO, and an Enterprise audience, scalability and end user experience is key to their success. They also wanted to ensure their web applications respond in < 10 seconds.

ManageEngine Applications Manager Solution:

Zoho used ManageEngine Applications Manager to ensure they monitor availability and troubleshoot application performance fast. Once setup, Applications Manager collects performance metrics at regular intervals and alarms when there is an anomaly.

With reports and graphs that provide realtime and historic information, users have the capability to make informed decisions. These reports also help predict inventory requirements.

The easy product setup and simple user interface ensured, they were able to deploy the product without any training and in a matter of hours. The Zoho Operations team was also able to successfully group the servers and applications based on the Business Applications they manage. This helped their operators to prioritize and manage incidents.

Zoho provides Software as a Service. This means, they deal with lots of customer data and security is paramount. This along with a 24x7 Operations team, called for proper ownership for servers and applications. With Applications Manager, Zoho was able to successfully provide custom views (read only) for their operators and other stake holders.

Solution for Various Stakeholders:

The various application teams entrust the delivery to the Service Delivery Manager, with the belief that the service is provided as per the SLAs set. This called for weekly reports to be sent to the Line of Business Managers about the quality of service. These weekly reports help them understand how their applications fare in production. They reported mainly on service outage, CPU usage, memory usage, web application response time and database utilization.

In addition to reports, when consumers complain about performance issues, the applications team can also directly login to the Applications Manager web client and troubleshoot whether the problem was with the server, database, application server or even a one-off client specific problem.