Finance powerhouse monitors their web applications from the users perspective

American Century knows how to manage financial websites. In addition to hosting their own website, their IT team also manages the backend for several other high-profile financial web properties. While their experience provides economies of scale for all their clients, this consolidation also exposes them to a higher degree of risk, requiring more diligent monitoring and management.

"Because of the complexity of our infrastructure, it was difficult for us to accurately correlate performance problems back to their root cause" said Myke Borylo, Sr. Web Infrastructure Engineer on the Enterprise Integration Team at American Century. "What we needed was a way to monitor our end users, and have that information automatically correlated with the infrastructure components fulfilling the requests."

American Century chose Symphoniq's TrueView Express technology to help them manage from the perspective of the end user. With TrueView Express, Borylo and his team were able to leverage their existing investment in an Application Delivery Controller from F5 to provide an easy mechanism for deploying a monitoring solution without impacting their administration or development teams, customers or end users.

"The implementation was easy," said Borylo. "After pointing it at my BIG-IP appliance, TrueView Express automatically pulled down and populated a list of all my virtual server names, so I could select the ones I wanted to monitor. Normally this would require a BIG-IP admin with expert iRule knowledge. With TrueView Express we were able to bypass a lot of complexity - two clicks and I was done!"

Using TrueView Express, Borylo was able to cut their mean time to resolution, and minimized the amount of people required to resolve issues once they were identified. "The proactive nature of the product and the fact that it reveals much more than just the problem on the surface helped us realize a near-instant ROI."