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