1. ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM AUGUST
2011CaseStudyAPPLICATION 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 IRONICALLY,
sophisticated IT managementThat environment includes a dedicated
Microsoft SQLI tools can create bottlenecks for the very prob-lems
theyre designed to solve. Such was thecase for Sentry Insurance
when an outage and Server database to maximize information gathered
during troubleshooting, Struble notes. Were 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 stillA 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)
beganthe hood. Because the dynaTrace solution does so much
searching for a better way to manage application perform- more than
just business application monitoring, were eval-Weve ance. We
wanted a tool that would help identify potentialuating 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.emergencyarchitect
for Sentry. And we hoped for a tool that could By March 2011 Sentry
completed the integration ofdrills 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, were During April and May 2010, Sentry
researched optionsaccording to Sanner. One of our policy
administrationaddressing 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 beforeof 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 allJEFF
SANNER, SENTRY INSURANCEto 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 Sentryutilization, transaction rates and transaction
response to initiate a trouble ticket with the responsible
third-party times. Overall, Struble adds, Sentrys 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, someSentry 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, SnapshotSanner says. In IT weve
minimized emergency drills and Company: Sentry Insurance (Stevens
Point, Wisconsin;were 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 theres less
downtime and appli- Lines of Business: Life, P&C and workers
compensation. cations are more responsive. I Vendor/Technology:
Waltham, Massachusetts-based dynaTrace softwares 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 Wrights Media at 877-652-5295. 79976