Offering 24h support with BMC Performance Manager

24 hour support is essential for some companies and it is not feasible in many cases to have someone checking periodically if everything is going well. It is much better to have an automatic process that checks with the necessary frequency what we consider appropriate.

Client: a telecommunication company
Need: To have 24-hour support for a critical system on which thousands of workers and hundreds of thousands of customers depend.

Previous situation: the response times were terrible. It could take hours for someone to give the warning that something was wrong or on the contrary it was warned for occasional issues that did not require intervention.

Determinants of the project: the system was very complex. And during the guards only one person had to carry the support of everything.

System description: Personal computers (hundreds), UNIX cluster servers, complicated networks, distributed Oracle databases were used.

Solution chosen: BMC Patrol, now Performance Manager.

Implementation: We analyzed the most common problems and saw the best way to detect them. We designed queries to the databases, both to the data dictionary and to the application tables to see if they worked correctly. On the other hand, UNIX scripts were created that scanned the error message files of the most important applications and checked if they executed the necessary tasks. The response times of certain tasks were also analyzed. The result of all this was managed by Patrol who sent alerts in the form of SMS and emails when the defined thresholds were exceeded. On the other hand, the results could be consulted later to evaluate the performance of the system. Now the support was not the last to find out but often solved the problems before they occurred or was the first and no one realized that it had really come to an incident. On the other hand, the support task was simplified because it was known where the system failed, or at least where it did not fail, regardless of the contradictory opinions of users.

Project cost: 100 days x man + BMC Patrol license.