1. ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM AUGUST 2011
CaseStudy APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MONITORING
Power-Packed
Upon implementing A monitoring solUtion to improve ApplicAtion performAnce,
sentry insUrAnce discovered even more Under the hood thAn it hAd hoped for.
I By Anne Rawland Gabriel I
RONICALLY, sophisticated IT management That environment includes a dedicated Microsoft SQL
I tools can create bottlenecks for the very prob-
lems they’re designed to solve. Such was the
case for Sentry Insurance when an outage and
Server database to maximize information gathered during
troubleshooting, Struble notes. “We’re very interested in
collecting fine-grained, long-term performance data to
subsequent slowdown affected a critical customer-facing facilitate capacity and resource planning,” he says.
application in spring 2010. “Although a resolution team
worked on it for several months, intermittent errors still A Good Problem to Have
remained,” recalls Jeff Sanner, director of application serv- If there was a challenge during the implementation, Struble
ices for the Stevens Point, Wisconsin-based insurer. suggests, it was a good problem to have: too much under
Consequently, Sentry ($11 billion in total assets) began the hood. “Because the dynaTrace solution does so much
searching for a better way to manage application perform- more than just business application monitoring, we’re eval-
“We’ve ance. “We wanted a tool that would help identify potential uating all of our tools, including dynaTrace, to determine
minimized issues proactively and assist with pinpointing what ... was what types of monitoring should be done by which tool,” he
causing the issue,” explains Shad Struble, senior technical explains.
emergency architect for Sentry. “And we hoped for a tool that could By March 2011 Sentry completed the integration of
drills and drill down into the code level to identify issue contribu- the dynaTrace software with all critical production sys-
tors.” tems, resulting in immediate performance improvements,
we’re During April and May 2010, Sentry researched options according to Sanner. “One of our policy administration
addressing and developed a short list of five vendors. A month later, systems involves 50 servers,” he relates. “During the first
two finalists were asked to perform back-to-back proofs quarter, our highest-activity season, the dynaTrace mon-
issues before of concept onsite. itoring dashboards allowed us to identify servers and
they occur.” “We supplied two production situations for the POC. transactions that were having an issue, take them out of
One included the intermittent errors we were never able production and, within minutes, resolve the issue — all
—JEFF SANNER,
SENTRY INSURANCE to resolve,” Struble recounts. “Then, during its four-day without any impact to users.”
POC, dynaTrace [Waltham, Mass.] was able to help locate Other benefits include holistic monitoring of server
the issue, pinpoint the problematic code and enable Sentry utilization, transaction rates and transaction response
to initiate a trouble ticket with the responsible third-party times. Overall, Struble adds, Sentry’s IT department has
vendor,” Struble continues, declining to identify the vendor. greatly improved its ability to meet previously unattain-
After inking a contract with dynaTrace in September, able service-level agreements. “Root cause analysis for
Sentry delayed implementation a month to take advantage issues occurring in complex, many-tiered systems used
of a new release of the software and allow senior devel- to require many days and many teams,” he comments.
opers to receive dynaTrace training. Meanwhile, to obtain “Now it can often be accomplished with the click of a
the scale needed for an enterprise dynaTrace deployment, button.”
Sentry established a small dedicated server farm, some Sentry plans to roll out and integrate dynaTrace across
of it virtualized, using commodity hardware. its various production, development and testing systems.
Plans also call for developing more-sophisticated SLAs and
creating advanced dashboards for senior management,
Snapshot Sanner says. “In IT we’ve minimized emergency drills and
Company: Sentry Insurance (Stevens Point, Wisconsin; we’re addressing issues before they occur in our production
$11 billion in total assets). environments,” he reports. “Best of all, our customers are
more productive because there’s less downtime and appli-
Lines of Business: Life, P&C and workers’ compensation. cations are more responsive.” I
Vendor/Technology: Waltham, Massachusetts-based dynaTrace
software’s Application Performance Management Solution.
Challenge: Resolve intermittent application errors while improving
overall systems availability and response times.
Posted with permission from Insurance & Technology. Copyright 2011.
For more information on the use of this content, contact Wright’s Media at 877-652-5295.
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