Case Study: Understanding Application Performance From The Outside In

When faced with service delivery and service quality challenges, the IT team for one of the largest financial services holding companies in the US assessed its application support team and realized that there were many opportunities for improvements. The new vice president of operations observed that the challenges centered on how the company's IT team managed the performance of their critical applications. Due to the company's dynamic infrastructure and multiple support teams, nobody knew the end-to-end picture of an application; therefore, managing its health and performance was a challenge. The group implemented a new application performance management solution, which resulted in $400,000 in operational cost savings and, more importantly, great improvements in the availability and performance of key applications for the company's customers. The company's journey toward a proactive application support team is described below.