Lets have a look at how PerformanceGuard supports decision making on all levels of an IT organization:

Susan – End User

Susan calls Service Desk to report that her computer is slow this morning—again ...!

It's the busiest time of the month, and she really needs to be able to do her work without delays.

Greg – 1st Level Supporter

Greg takes the incoming call from Susan. He uses the Computer Overview dashboard in PerformanceGuard to look up Susan's computer. The dashboard shows that Susan's computer lives up to standard requirements for RAM, etc.

Greg asks some probing questions, and finds that Susan's computer is primarily slow when she works with a particular server-based finance application.

Greg now looks at the PerformanceGuard dashboard's Event Timeline: It confirms that Susan has recently had response time problems when she worked with the finance application.

Greg thanks Susan for reporting the issue, and he tells her that he and his colleagues will look into the problem immediately. He then takes a snapshot of the PerformanceGuard dashboard and attaches it to the Service Desk ticket, when he escalates the issue to Danny, the Problem Manager, for further investigation.

Danny – Problem Manager

Danny uses the Application Status dashboard in PerformanceGuard to verify how many users have had response time problems when they worked with the server-based finance application.

He finds that 12 user's computers across three office locations have recently had response time events when they worked with the finance application.

Because computers at three separate locations have had the same type of events when they worked with the finance application, Danny reckons that the problem must be server-related rather than network-related.

In PerformanceGuard Danny creates a report with graphs that illustrate the problem. He attaches the report, when he escalates the issue to John, who manages the finance application server.

John – Server Operations Manager

John looks at the report from Danny: It's evident that there is a problem with the finance application server's response times.

In PerformanceGuard John analyzes the performance of the finance application server, and finds that the server's response times increase dramatically when the server gets many requests.

He finds that this has been the case for the first three working days of each of the last three months. That corresponds with the times when Susan and her colleagues use the finance application the most for their monthly reporting.

John concludes that the finance application server needs a hardware upgrade to be able to cope with the workload at busy times.

In PerformanceGuard John compiles a report that backs up his upgrade request, and he then sends the report along with the request to his manager Steven as well as to the Service Delivery Manager Chris.

Steven – IT Business Manager
Chris – Service Delivery Manager

Steven and Chris use PerformanceGuard to verify the information that they've received from John.

They agree to allocate $$$ of Steven's budget to a hardware upgrade for the finance application server.

In Steven and Chris' weekly report to the company's CIO, Jonathan Kowalczyk, they include parts of the PerformanceGuard evidence from Server Operations Manager John to justify the expense.

Jonathan Kowalczyk – CIO

The CIO accepts the need for a hardware upgrade.

However, he asks Steven and Chris to provide evidence of the effect of the upgrade once it has been performed.

Epilog

The following month Susan and her colleagues get much faster responses when they work with the finance application server to produce their monthly reports. – Not that Susan or her colleagues really notice: From their perspective, things just work the way that they're supposed to.

From the business perspective, however, it means that Susan and her colleagues can now get important work done much more efficiently: Now, the people who rely on the monthly reports from Susan and her colleagues can also get their work done faster.

That becomes very evident when the CIO receives a PerformanceGuard report from Steven and Chris: The report contains an executive summary of finance application server response times from before and after the hardware upgrade, and the positive effects of the money spent on the upgrade are clear to everyone.

... and a Postscript

John, the Server Operations Manager, doesn't want something like this to catch him by surprise again. Since the incident, John has set up notifications in PerformanceGuard, so that he'll automatically get an e-mail if multiple computers are affected by server response time problems.

That way he'll get an early indication of such problems, and he'll be able to analyze them and deal with them before end users like Susan really become affected. Now John deals with problems proactively, rather than reactively.

IT makes organizations efficient; PerformanceGuard makes IT efficient.

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