Parliament's IT Systems

Smoothly managed by ManageEngine Applications Manager

Challenge:

The IT department of a big parliament, had to constantly monitor and manage the various systems, servers and databases present.

The environment consisted of Oracle 11i ERP Servers, IIS Servers, Web Servers, Server that runs enterprise Document Management System, Oracle Databases, SQL Server databases that run various applications like Help Desk Software, Project Management System and etc.,

The administrators were responsible for monitoring the system's availability and performance. There was a strong requirement for an automated web-based tool to manage these systems from a single web console.

Solutions Considered

Manual maintenance put a time constraint on the team, moreover they could not be alarmed of an impending
problem. Only after a failure happened, they would check the logs and the resource utilization manually and
take the necessary corrective action.

To over come the maintenance overhead, they briefly looked at HP Open view and many other such systems;these systems were far too complicated and costly for their basic requirements.

They were looking out for a technically comprehensive solution at an affordable cost.

ManageEngine Applications Manager Solution

Applications Manager's monitoring capabilities was a perfect answer to their requirement. Applications Manager is platform independent and very simple in usage. The affordable cost was also a major booster.

Database Architect on why ManageEngine Applications Manager was bought:

"Applications Manager was considered for evaluation because it is very cost-effective when compared to some of the other monitoring systems on the market,” said Database Architect, Parliament. "Furthermore, we had the freedom to run it on either the Windows or the Linux platform.

I also liked the fact that the trial version did not expire as this gave me the freedom to run a full test over an extended period of time. During our intensive testing period, the support team was very responsive and helpful. We were very satisfied by its monitoring capabilities and we promptly bought the tool".

ManageEngine Applications Manager in Action

"The Parliament server, which is used to disseminate important political news and provide the contact
details of key decision-makers in the country was continuously freezing" says Database Architect,
Parliament "By running ManageEngine Applications Manager, we were able monitor the different components of the system (database, web server and operating system).According to Applications Managers reports, the database and the O/S continued to function normally during the failure and we were able to pinpoint the web server as the source of the problem and fix it".

Technical Benefits

Fault Management

Whenever the monitors crossed the threshold, alarms were generated and notified to the administrators through Email. alarms could be configured in such a way that the operator is notified even before the problem occurred, for e.g., a warning alarm would be sent if the connection time of the database is greater than two seconds, a failure (critical alarm) would be reported if the connection time of the database becomes greater than four seconds.

Root Cause Analysis

If an issue has cropped up, say project management application is down; Applications Manager itself does the root cause analysis. For E.g., the hard disk usage on the system where the Project Management applications was at 95%, Applications Manager indicated that, as the exact problem. Also provides performance reports on all the associated monitors like database, operating system and servers on which the application runs and identifies the problem component. Applications Manager thereby, provides real-time visibility into all applications.

Improved System Performance

The bottlenecks in performance of the various servers can be easily identified; it is easier to act upon these
bottlenecks and it lead to improved system performance.

Improved Uptime

By quickly resolving the downtimes, the overall uptime of the resources increased. The uptime reports are usually submitted to the Parliament.

Reports

The graphs and reports could be viewed on a custom-defined hour, daily, weekly, and monthly basis and could be generated quickly. They also provided visibility into Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) for each application/service; this helped to meet the service levels required. Different reports based on the resource type:Business Application report, Application Server report, Database Server report, Service report, System report could be generated.

Excellent Technical Support

ManageEngine has a very responsive Technical support team to resolve the issues at the earliest. Feature requests have been promptly taken up in the updates.

Business Benefits

Holistic view of the entire setup

The entire gamut of all IT resources could be monitored from a single web console. This makes management and monitoring of IT resources comparatively easy and eliminates overhead costs of maintaining different management tools for different IT resources.

Enhances Business Continuity

System Administrators are aware that a probable downtime is going to occur through warning alarms and fixes the issue immediately without the user facing any downtime, thereby guarantying the users unaffected services.

Resource Optimization

System Administrators are equipped to identify under-utilized systems and move the load from over-utilized systems, resulting in optimal utilization of the hardware and software resources.

Budget gets smaller

Increased grip on the inefficiencies extends the life of the servers. Smart investment decisions were possible based on the performance reports. Lower maintenance over-head reduced the Total Cost of Ownership. With the price of Applications Manager being on the lower side, the Return on Investment was very high.

Increases Productivity

Moving from manual monitoring to automated monitoring by itself resulted in an exponential growth in productivity. The intuitive GUI of Applications Manager minimizes the learning curve and the tool can be deployed easily. As the root cause analysis of the issue is shown already, the administrators were involved in fixing the issues only. And also, they respond to email alarms as opposed to periodic manual checkups.

Summary

ManageEngine Applications Manager software plays a super- system administrator and effectively manages all the systems and servers used by the Parliament, saving significant cost and person-hours of resources.

Applications Manager packed with rich features and affordable cost continues its march in the enterprise domain.More such customers are relying on Applications Manager for effective functioning of their IT resources