End-to-End Monitoring Solution

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End-to-End Monitoring Solution
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Background

• BCBSM has utilized IBMs Tivoli Framework for
  monitoring for many years
• We lacked an ability to see end-to-end response
  time within our applications
• We were having intermittent issues within our
  call center and web portals related to response
  time
• We had the tools to look at each tier but would
  often have to search for the root cause of the
  problem
• Issues would be passed between support teams with
  each attempting to prove the problems was not in
  their area which extended recovery time

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Background

• We conducted a RFP and Proof of Concept process
  to select a vendor to provide end-to-end response
  monitoring across infrastructure tiers
• Seven vendors responded and the field was
  narrowed to OpTier and IBM for the POC
• Both vendors were onsite for the POC and
  installed their products in our test environment
• Monitoring was implemented for our Provider
  Portal application
• OpTiers solution installed quickly and was
  providing real time data within a few days, with
  low overhead allowing production use
• The CoreFirst product identified application
  behavior during the POC that our development team
  had forgotten about

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Current State

• CoreFirst is in production for our Member Portal
  and Online Enrollment application
• Weve used CoreFirst to identify an expensive
  login transaction which has been tuned

• CoreFirst has been rolled out to our portal
  development team and they are using the product
  during testing
• The development team is developing a top 10 list
  to identify performance tuning opportunities to
  be included in new releases.

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Future Plans

• Continue rolling out CoreFirst to remaining
  production applications
• Set appropriate thresholds for service levels
• Tie CoreFirst to Tivoli for alerting and
  notification

• Pursue prioritization capabilities of CoreFirst
• Integrate use of CoreFirst into development
  methodology to validate new releases before they
  reach production
• Use production flow information to develop the
  appropriate test coverage

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We use it in production to solve problems

• Gerry McDonough