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Challenges
Being a member of the network team in Florida's largest city means ensuring network performance and on-time application delivery for a myriad of city functions from the police and emergency services to city building inspectors looking up the status of a building permit.

Many applications delivering services are housed on multiple server tiers, each tier handling a different application process. For example, the city's building inspectors rely on a robust application that consists of a front-end web server coupled together with multiple back-end database servers to track and manage the building permit approval process.

These applications are typically developed internally and can be extremely complex to troubleshoot. The city lacked the ability to quickly sort through the multiple points of potential failure or delay within applications to identify the problem source. In addition to troubleshooting multi-tiered applications, the city needed a flexible monitoring solution that would support its extensive VoIP rollouts.

"We were convinced Observer would meet our diverse range of management needs, especially when we saw Observer's expansive VoIP capabilities, from monitoring VoIP quality to being able to reconstruct calls. The number of ways we can use it on the network allows it to quickly pay for itself."

The city worked with Sinnott Wolach Technology Group, a provider of network monitoring and information security management solutions, to implement a cost-effective network management strategy. According to CTO Jeff Wolach, "The city's network team was looking for a long-term monitoring solution that would allow them to maximize their troubleshooting resources and provide in-depth support for standard and emerging applications like unified communications. Observer offered immediate savings by reducing their mean time to resolution and allowing them to rely on a single solution rather than deploying multiple point solutions."

Pinpointing Application Delay
In a muli-tiered environment, spotting the source of delay can be like finding a needle in a haystack. With the majority of the applications developed in house, it falls to the city's network team to handle the user complaints, pinpoint the exact problem, and communicate with the development, application, or server team what went wrong.

"Handling these complaints can be a complex process," said Chris Fowler, senior network architect. "It's up to us to determine whether a performance problem is caused by the application code, server, network, or end user. Using Observer's expert analysis features like Connection Dynamics, which graphically displays server-to-client communication in detail, makes it easy to spot the delay source and explain the problem to the correct IT team."

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