Exostar

Challenge

Due to the rapid growth of its product suite utilization and the industry’s mandates for high levels of application availability, Exostar faced two primary challenges. First, the company required a straightforward way to track the performance trend of its applications to proactively prevent any degradation that would impact the customer experience. Secondly, Exostar discovered that although the company conducts extensive monitoring of its application availability at the “nuts-and-bolts” technical level, it needed a more functional form of monitoring, which can be a better indicator of impending issues. Exostar wanted a way to see if the most important online business processes were slowing down.

Solution

Exostar was looking for a reliable Web performance monitoring solution that could support all the needed technical features, yet offered a good value in terms of pricing. Specifically Exostar required a Web monitoring solution with the ability to monitor multiple-step business processes, employing user ID/password and certificate-based authentication. Exostar also needed clear and concise reporting of collected measurements, as well as trustworthy notification.“AlertSite’s error detection is extremely reliable,” said Kevin Glenn, Director of Systems Architecture at Exostar. “We regularly trace alerts to root causes and solve them quickly so our daily business operations are not affected.”

How many other solutions were considered? Our Technical Operations team searched for a company with high performance standards at competitive pricing. In our search for the right solution for Exostar, we investigated solutions from companies such as Mercury and Keynote.

How did you learn about AlertSite? We have been using AlertSite^®[from SmartBear] for three years and had originally heard of them through their reputation in the industry as a solid Web performance monitoring company. We found AlertSite through their online marketing.

What were some of the key evaluation criteria? We were specifically interested in a solution that offered: the ability to monitor multiple-step transactions; the ability to use userID/password as well as client certificate-based authentication; the ability to report performance trends over time; and the ability to notify immediately of availability or performance concerns.

Why did you choose AlertSite’s website performance monitoring solution over competing solutions? Which specific AlertSite solution are you utilizing? After researching possible options, we found that competing products were able to meet most, if not all, of the criteria we were looking for. However, AlertSite seemed to have more responsive customer care for Exostar’s fast-paced needs, helping our company address the challenges we were facing, while offering a more price sensitive solution. For the past three years, we have been successfully executing the AlertSite Business Transaction Monitor, which now monitors all of Exostar’s key customer solutions.

How is your Web performance monitoring solution important to your success? Providing world-class service and support to our clients is essential to Exostar’s business, and utilizing AlertSite has enabled us to fine-tune control over the performance and availability of our product suite.

What do you think are the benefits of AlertSite’s Web performance monitoring solution? What do you like best? AlertSite’s clear and concise performance reporting have enabled us to take a proactive stance towards improving performance of our systems as opposed to reacting to emergency situations. Exostar also is better equipped to react to tactical issues much more quickly, leading to higher uptime numbers month after month. As a result of using AlertSite’s Web transaction monitoring services, we have instilled confidence in our customers that we can reliably and consistently maintain high performance and reliability levels through proactive monitoring of trends and optimization exercises on our solutions. AlertSite’s monitoring frees up our technical staff to focus on new product development, feature enhancements and other strategic work that results in greater customer satisfaction.

Do you have any plans for further use of AlertSite products? We plan to add business transaction monitoring for any new relevant applications we deploy.