You could say that Jennifer sent their hearts racing—that it was love at first sight for the Korea Housing Guarantee Co. IT team.
In 2006, after suffering through many hours of downtime because of a temperamental WebSphere Application Server running on IBM i, the IT team at Korea Housing Guarantee Co., Ltd. was glad to see Jennifer. The team took one look at the software solution's dashboard (Figure 1) displaying performance data on its website and quickly drilled down to the root of the downtime.
After all, with the web-based applications intermittently down, employees of Korea Housing Guarantee had a difficult time keeping things running smoothly for its customers in the housing industry.
A Guarantee
Korea Housing Guarantee, based in Seoul, Korea, is a government-funded corporation that provides financial guarantees to both housing contractors and people building homes. The company was founded in 1993 and has 362 employees.
Korea Housing Guarantee's products protect people building homes and the contractors they hire by guaranteeing that projects will be completed or that money will be returned when a housing deal falls through. The company also provides housing quality certification services, guarantee execution, credit management and ration, authorized housing efficiency rating, and real estate information financial services.
The company's network includes more than 300 PCs connected to a System i 520, two iSeries model 870s, and two iSeries model 270s supported by an IT team of about 30 people. The website applications run on WebSphere 4.0.
So when the company's web-based business solution started acting up, Korea Housing Guarantee turned to Jennifer.
A Solution
Developed by the Korean company Jennifersoft, Inc., Jennifer is an application performance management tool that helps the IT team identify website performance issues.
It examines availability and performance metrics for J2EE application servers and surrounding systems. Using different sections of the Jennifer Dashboard, (System Performance, System Resource Usage, Problem/Error, User/Load, Status) IT administrators can see what is happening with system status. It monitors web-based business solutions for failed transactions, delayed transaction times, intermittent service failures, and other performance problems. Jennifer can eliminate peak load web server crashes.
During the application development cycle, Jennifer provides performance management services for the application at the operation stage.
The solution is based on the J2EE web application server technology and supports IBM i and WebSphere, as well as other major hardware platforms and web servers.
A Problem (No More)
The Korea Housing Guarantee IT team had spent a lot of time trying to resolve its web application woes; however, after installing Jennifer, the company almost immediately went to the root cause of the problem by analyzing log data provided by Jennifer 3.2.
And since the solution installed so seamlessly in just 30 minutes, Korea Housing Guarantee IT team members didn't bother to research any other solutions. Besides, the company determined that other solutions wouldn't meet its needs because they don't provide the level of customization that Jennifer does.
Ultimately, the Korea Housing Guarantee IT team worked with engineers from one of Jennifersoft's reseller partners to achieve server stability.
The IT team is extremely happy with the solution and its capabilities. For example, IT team members are able to analyze detailed transaction information in realtime, which helps them anticipate performance problems that could occur in the future, improving server stability and minimizing downtime.
IT team members especially appreciate Jennifer's X-View graph, which displays each transaction's profile data based on response time. They use it every day to analyze SQL transactions.
The only thing that the Korea Housing Guarantee IT team said they would change about the system is its lack of database monitoring capabilities. Team members wish they had integrated a database monitoring tool with the WebSphere monitoring solution from the beginning.
Still, the love that the Korea Housing Guarantee IT team feels for Jennifer is more than just infatuation. The company hasn't conducted a cost analysis of the benefits of using Jennifer, but has experienced noticeable reductions in IT costs with less downtime and fewer performance problems. And thanks to Jennifer, the IT team spends one quarter of the time it used to on problems—from analysis to resolution.
Rita-Lyn Sanders is the senior industry editor of System iNEWS.
Jennifersoft, Inc.
Milpitas, Calif.
408-946-5508