Business Value of Vityl Capacity Management (formerly TeamQuest): This legislative body uses Vityl Capacity Management to find and identify performance problems, plan for the future, assist in time management and be more proactive.
Service Interruptions Prevent Service Growth
This MIS Director and his team of six serve a local legislature and employees with limited resources. Since the user-to-IT ratio was over 70 customers to one IT professional, this team was busy firefighting, taking calls from unhappy customers complaining of service interruptions and slow downs.
We wanted to provide more services and be more proactive,” says the MIS Director, “but we were too busy with the day-to-day stuff.
MIS Director US Legislative Body
“We were trying to eliminate the possibilities one by one,” says the MIS Director. The MIS division couldn’t identify the cause. Customers were calling to say that the servers were the problem, the system was slow, or the Internet connection was bad.
“We wanted to provide more services and be more proactive,” says the director, “but we were too busy with the day-to-day stuff.” Plans to get IP phones up and running, set up the ability for web casts, and work on a service calls database were stalled. User complaints kept the MIS department from providing essential services.
The team couldn’t move forward with their projects until they uncovered the reasons for the pains experienced by their customers. Their productivity was constrained, as was their ability to be more proactive. They were reacting to problems as they occurred rather than proactively identifying the problems before they impacted users.
The MIS director discussed options with management and began looking for a tool to help his team:
- Find and identify performance problems
- Plan for the future
- Assist in time management
- Be proactive
Tackling Availability Issues
The team was like forensic scientists at the scene of a crime without the proper tools. The evidence was there, but they had no way to collect and analyze it to solve the mystery.
“We were looking at what our customers were doing individually and trying to answer the question ‘why is this so slow?’” says the director.
The team then engaged in a Vityl Capacity Management proof of concept that highlighted the improvements that could be made with the proper capacity planning tools. The organization uses Windows-based servers.
The director and his team were able to see the bandwidth usage of the Internet connection, but couldn’t see what was going through it. Using a network application agent, the team was able to view the activity and resource consumption by individual users to get a better view of what was happening.
“We created workloads that corresponded to the applications and were able to see how much resource each user was consuming from the application,” says the MIS director. “Essentially, we were able to see the activity inside the T1 pipes.”
He had realized Vityl Capacity Management would meet his needs, but most importantly, it would make his job easier.
The software opened doors for the team. “We never had the ability to identify a specific problem or individual as far as trafficking and so forth over our network,” says the director.
Vityl Capacity Management helped “take some of the blame off of us. We were hearing ‘hey my people can’t do their work’ because of this issue or that and now we can actually identify the problem, create a report and show them the real issue.”
MIS Director US Legislative Body
“Vityl Capacity Management gave us the ability to look at how much data was going across or between an individual and the server that’s running the application,” he said. “Now we can pinpoint whether it’s something the user is doing or if it’s something with the server, for example.”
According to the administrator, Vityl Capacity Management helped “take some of the blame off of us. We were hearing ‘hey my people can’t do their work’ because of this issue or that and now we can actually identify the problem, create a report and show them the real issue.”
IT Working with the Business
What the director and his team found was that many of the users were sucking up resources. “Our users were running a million and one web pages,” he said.
It turns out many of the employees were streaming audio and video files at the same time they were running database applications.
“Customers still want to say it isn’t their fault,” he says, “but we have proof now.”
The MIS department plans to share more information with management by providing monthly or quarterly reports to each division manager showing each employee’s computer resource consumption on the Internet and network.
This legislature finds value in Vityl Capacity Management through improved customer service and application availability. Identifying problems before they affect end users has made the MIS director and his team more proactive, freeing time for those other projects.
“Now we’re able to fix a problem before it becomes a nightmare.”
Get a Live Demonstration
See for yourself how Vityl Capacity Management can help your organization avoid downtime, mitigate risk, and keep costs down.