Infrared360® is a complete solution for Administration, Monitoring, Testing, Auditing, Self-Service/Automation and Statistical Reporting for your enterprise middleware environment.
Industry: Transportation (large international)
Years Customer: 10
Employees: 10,000+
Quick Environment hits: WebSphere MQ/WAS, TC Server, TIBCO EMS
A large transportation company was experiencing numerous issues with their middleware management solution for their legacy systems before switching to Infrared360.
- Previous solution had been 2-3 releases out of date with expired maintenance and only had a 38% of queues were being monitored.
- Agents frequently went down resulting in basic alerts not being received.
- Main business issues: Customers would call complaining they were not getting their reservations confirmed (which was one of the main ways how the company would then know their solution was not working properly). Messages were also not being received from the fleet.
The company realized their current solution was not effective. Along with 2 other products, Infrared360 was entered in a “bake off” – all products were installed and used a checklist format. The main criteria included: ease of creating and monitoring objects as well as top notch management and monitoring overall solution.
In the end, Infrared360 not only scored the highest on the main criteria and checklist but the solution was also chosen because the solution is TRULY agentless – they didn’t have to go to their individual location nodes and install various pieces and configure agents. The fact that IR360 was web-based, easy to deploy and provided the ability to see the environment quickly and create alerts quickly pushed IR360 over the top. While cost also played a factor, the support the company received thru the process and the relationship with their account executive and technical staff made them feel even more secure about choosing Avada and IR360.
The implementation process: “Smoother than expected, there were no ‘uh oh’ surprises and lots of ‘oh it can do that?!'” The pleasant surprises of realizing more of what they wanted to and could do easily justified their decision to the organization.
Effective Benefits of IR360: Quick support turnaround, “best product support out there.” The easy deployment and the ease of getting other team members up to speed quickly was key, time and effort was saved by easily delegating tasks to other people. Two FTE’s support over 100 queue managers, without IR360 they could not have had, “Other people in the environment that weren’t strictly MQ people.” The customer was also very happy with the ease of creating rules, automation, and script creation – plus the ability to clone scripts and assign to the other groups.
Due to IR360’s capabilities, the customer is now looking to expand the use of the product into their Tibco EMS environment (the existing tool for EMS is ‘extremely difficult’ to create rules), as well as leveraging the capabilities for web services.
Best practices: “With an MQ challenge, think IR360 first and go from there.” “Leverage IR360 to the fullest and learn something new every day.” ” Use IR360 as a service and create rules in user instance, share and create production rules and easily turn it over to the users.”
Overall lessons learned: IR360 enabled the customer to go from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive.’ The longer IR360 has been in the environment, the MQ environment as continued to grow – more people are wanting to use it, and developers and testers are doing things faster than imagined.
