Captell and
the Department of Veterans' Affairs
Over the last 22 months
we've been able to set up reporting for our
Mainframe, Windows (incl VMWare servers), AIX
and WAN and LAN infrastructure. On each of
these platforms we have been able to implement
reporting, using a variety of sources, and
written reporting for daily, weekly, monthly and
quarterly intervals - including a range of
parameter driven reports that help with problem
diagnosis. I have received very positive
feedback from our front-line technical support.
Captell's support for automation has
saved me an enormous amount of time. Once a
report has been set up it requires no further
effort - data collection, retention and
publication & delivery are all taken care of so
I am able to spend much more time on high-value
work rather than 'housekeeping' existing
systems. This has helped to identify
opportunities for cost-reduction as well as
service improvement.
One unexpected benefit of our approach is that
we can capture and analyse high granularity
data. Because of the aggregation hierarchy
designed into many off-the-shelf monitors we
found it difficult to identify problems once the
data was more than a few days old because the
monitor had started aggregating to hourly
average values. Through the use of high
frequency data over longer periods, better
statistical techniques and more high-value
analysis time, we have been able to identify
capacity and performance problems previously
undetected.
I believe our investment in Captell has proven
very successful.
Roger Stenlake
ICT Capacity Planner
Dept Veterans' Affairs
Mob 0417 669626
Email
roger.stenlake@dva.gov.au
Medicare Australia's use of the Captell
System On 23 April 2008 Medicare Australia
engaged Captell Developments to audit its
storage and application servers to ensure that
they were performing at full capacity and were
being wholly utilised.
“We used the [Captell] system to understand how
money can be saved and services improved,
resulting in a stream of benefits for all of
Medicare Australia stakeholders.”
Medicare Australia IT Operations Manager
Medicare Australia IT
Operations Manager praised the outcomes of the
audit “The data obtained from the Captell audit provided the basis for
future planning, and ensured that best value
could be derived from the IT infrastructure and
sharper internal processes could be rolled out
for capacity management, configuration
management and availability management”.
Read the full story here
Cost reduction
A moderately sized federal
government department running their mainframe at
100%, 24 hours per day for 6 and a half days per
week were looking at a very expensive upgrade,
not so much in terms of CPU but the associated
increase in software costs, these were a killer.
Utilising regular reporting with a focus on
the cost of resource consumption they were able
to target tuning efforts and 2 years later
they are still running on the same hardware with
an average utilisation of around 70 – 80%.
Managing Windows Server farm running BMC
patrol data collectors
A large financial
institution with some 250 – 300 Wintel servers
had little visibility of the performance and
capacity utilisation of their server farm.
Performance problems were sometimes simply
resolved with a processor upgrade.
Implementing automated data collection using
BMC Patrol and Patrol Express clients and
utilising the Captell reporting system provided
the knowledge they needed to more accurately
manage their environment.
During actual report implementation a server
suffering performance problems was identified,
the initial thought was that the server was CPU
constrained; the report revealed that a single
disk was experiencing extremely high IO rates
which were the actual cause of the performance
issue.
Improving reliability and performance of the
Capacity Reporting facilities
Another federal
government department with quite comprehensive
existing reporting facilities found their
reports were taking considerable time in
production with little time for analysis. The
reporting facilities occasionally suffered
failures which further increased the time for
delivery or produced inaccurate reports.
Adopting Captell they found the accuracy and
reliability of their reporting infrastructure
increased and reports that normally took 10
hours to produce were now produced in less than
2 hours. The extra time could now be spent
analysing the report data and providing much
needed report enhancements.
Large Windows server farm running Mercury
Sitescope monitoring
An organisation with some
1000+ servers in their Windows environment had
little or no visibility of the activities
occurring in their server farm. Running the
Mercury Sitescope monitors gave them performance
and capacity data; however, little could be done
with this enormous volume. During a 3 day trial
period our consultants were able to process the
Sitescope data and generate comprehensive
reports for their environment. These reports
included a summary report which identifies
servers that may be of interest; high CPU
utilisation, paging activity or low disk space
etc. This short list provided input to the
secondary reports which provided much more
detail on the activities being carried out on
these servers of interest.
Asset management reporting for an outsourced
client
A license to use Captell was acquired by a
large outsourcing firm to provide asset
management reports back to one of the
organisations they provide IT management
services to. This involved implementing
Captell to process data from Tivoli, SMS,
Spreadsheets, CSV files and SAP to ultimately
produce a list of network assets under
management. The asset records were
classified to the clients organisational
structure and included the cost to the client.
The Captell web interface was used to deliver
dynamic reports back to the client from the
outsourcer on a monthly basis and allowed the
client to verify the outsourcer's monthly
invoice and to manage their network assets in a
much better fashion.
Network assets included, PCs, Laptops,
Printers and other peripherals, Network switches
and routers, and servers. |
