Editor’s note: This post tells the story about a MaaS provider who deployed advanced technology to ensure IBM WebSphere application availability and proactively troubleshoot and resolve end user performance issues for a large online athletic retailer. This is a guest post from Bill Karounos, CEO of TransformaTech and a trusted Goliath Service Provider. Transforma Tech utilizes Goliath Performance Monitor to deliver MaaS or Monitoring as a Service for IBM WebSphere to their customers.

The gift-giving rush of the holiday season can make or break a retailer and downtime, performance degradation, and delays in order processing in their online shopping experience during this time can be incredibly damaging to the business. Thus, proactively monitoring and maintaining these environments using the most state-of-art IBM WebSphere application monitoring solutions available is understandably a high priority for members of the retail industry.

As a MaaS, IT service provider, my team at TransformaTech Inc. is often asked by clients to solve these types of problems. Consequently, when we were selected by a billion-dollar athletic retailer to ensure the application availability of IBM WebSphere Message Broker and MQ Environments during peak times, we knew that we could make a big improvement in performance in IBM WebSphere performance based on our past history of doing this for other MaaS customers.

The Challenge and the Pain in Delivering MaaS

Our client was operating an unsupported IBM WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) version 6 in the production environments responsible for supporting their critical retail stores and web based operations. They also had major components of their HR and backend warehouse systems running on these WMB and MQ environments.

Our job was to not only upgrade these IBM WebSphere applications but also to provide a 24/7 MaaS performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and support services with the expectation of 100% availability of the IBM WebSphere and MQ environments that support their critical business applications during the client’s crucial holiday season.

The Problem and Pain Solution

After designing an upgrade path for both WMB and MQ; our performance monitoring, troubleshooting and support plan included deploying the TransformaTech Monitor product for WMB and MQ monitoring and the Goliath Performance Monitor solution for complete system monitoring of servers and resources.

This MaaS solution kept tabs on several key performance metrics including:

  • Application availability
  • Application Errors and events for the applications
  • Server performance
  • Application incident management and resolution of production issues
  • Weekly, management-level reporting on incidents, environment health and related metrics
  • Application Maintenance, troubleshooting, and development resolutions for the WMB Production environments

The Goliath Performance Monitor solution provided advanced application monitoring capabilities such as the ability to set up custom alerts as well as alert resolution options that kept us two steps ahead of any problems, and equally important, provided consistency across our team when troubleshooting support issues.

And when 100% availability is the client’s requirement, you cannot possibly be proactive enough.

The Results

Our client achieved continuous, efficient operations throughout the peak holiday season including 24/7 availability and high performance of WebSphere Message Broker and MQ. Based on this success, we were retained to continue to provide monitoring and support, subject matter expertise, development support, and knowledge transfer as our client continues to optimize their overall architecture and support additional business requirements.

At TransformaTech, we pride ourselves on “doing whatever it takes” to meet our clients expectations through expert knowledge, dedication, commitment, and hard work, and our partnership with Goliath Technologies has been pivotal in meeting this and other client’s needs as they share this work ethic and philosophy.

We first partnered with Goliath Technologies a few years ago when we were engaged in monitoring the server performance of the Pennsylvania Department of Revenues, and it has been a strong and fruitful business relationship ever since. As MaaS provider, we value Goliath’s willingness to provide flexible business terms and develop solutions that meet our exact requirements.

Goliath offers a fully supported 30-day free trial of their Proactive IT Performance Monitoring Software.

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