FRAMINGHAM (02/07/2000) - A tiny dot-com and a major insurance company faced radically different network problems:One needed to keep online customers satisfied -- by not waiting -- during the busy holiday season. The other needed to make sure his ASP delivered what it promised. Both used application-monitoring tools to resolve potential problems.
At 4-month-old Jewelry.com -- a 100% pure dot-com business -- Chairman and CEO Paul Rajewski says he marshaled his tiny El Segundo, Calif., staff to build a Web site to sell retail jewelry. They used e-commerce software from San Francisco-based Intershop Communications Inc. and linked it to the company's Sybase Inc. databases for a mid-November launch.
Jewelry.com "needed to make sure customers were getting good response time at our site," Rajewski says. But the start-up had minimal staff and resources to handle the crucial monitoring of its Web site, Internet and ASP.
Vendors and providers spent too much time shifting blame instead of providing numbers, Rajewski says. So "we got the guys at Candle [Corp.] to ping our site and give us reports on performance. Then we compared the data to the volume we were experiencing," he says.
Reports from Candle's CandleNet eBusiness Assurance Network 2000 correlating customer response time and usage to server performance showed the big problem wasn't hardware or software, but the Internet itself, says Rajewski.
Jewelry.com quickly switched providers, choosing San Francisco-based Digital Island Inc., which offers Web caching at multiple sites nationwide. The move solved many underlying problems, he says.
CandleNet relies on network, server and application-performance data collected by its ServiceMonitor Web application-monitoring software to supply technical and business process-oriented reports. Based on a Java applet, it activates when a user enters a Web address, measuring the time it takes for the data to get from user to Web server and back. Candle then analyzes and warehouses the data. Users access these performance reports, presented in Web format, through a virtual private network linked to a Candle Web site.
During the holiday shopping rush, CandleNet reported a linkage problem, Rajewski says, "and we tracked it down to a lost [SprintNet] router near our hosting site."
"The knee-jerk reaction you get when something goes wrong is, well, it's not us," Rajewski says. "If you can come in with real data that says, Yeah, it is you,' it changes the whole conversation, and your credibility goes through the roof."
Rajewski says he plans to expand reporting to include users' browse times and clickstreams as well as how long it takes each object on his company's site to download on the user's desktop. "That's going to be useful information. We're launching into Phase 2 of our operation," he says.
CIO James Barry oversees the complex enterprise systems at Insurance Holdings of America's Consumer Insurance Division in Beverly, Mass. Those include a 300-seat call center and 1,100 local and remote desktop users nationwide linked via an extranet at more than 100 sites, some no more than a booth at bulk retailer Sam's Club stores.
The complexity extended to the networks. "We have a significant IP infrastructure" as well as some asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), frame-relay and gigabit Ethernet networks, says Barry.
His staff -- six or seven people who cover three shifts to provide around-the-clock coverage -- was at its limit. Now they had a new problem:
Monitor the performance of an insurance-selling application hosted by an ASP.
Stopping the finger-pointing was more difficult for Barry than for Rajewski.
Barry chose the Vital monitoring package from International Network Services (INS) in Sunnyvale, Calif. His team deployed VitalAgent to all 1,100 desktops for network events monitoring. The 4,000-byte-size agents collect data and send it to a VitalConsole at headquarters in Beverly. Barry's team is also using the VitalHelp, VitalAnalysis and Enterprise Pro components.
But the company's "core business application is homegrown, and there was no tool on this planet that could monitor it," Barry says. Using VitalSuite's Transact tool kit, "we built hooks into our application so we cannot only monitor it, but also tweak performance," he says.
Barry credited INS's services team with a speedy implementation. "We allowed six or seven months for the rollout," he says. "We did it within 30 days."
Barry's staff is down to three. The monitoring system replaced six people "sitting there staring at screens," he says.
Vital Suite tracks each transaction and event throughout the system, letting Barry's staff tune performance before it becomes a systemwide problem, he says.
"If the same kind of thing happens with five users, it correlates the data and tells me about it.
"I took some grief from financial [on the VitalSuite implementation], until I explained the [return on investment]," Barry says. He says he's planning a convergence project involving voice over IP and ATM, a unified messaging platform and "maybe wireless."