LandAmerica to track application, virtual system health with Netuitive

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

As LandAmerica Financial Group worked to centralize and streamline company title and escrow systems, IT leaders at the real estate transaction services company realized an investment in performance management software might be necessary to provide both executives and technicians with a comprehensive view of the environment.

The challenge LandAmerica faced involved bringing together numerous distributed approaches to performance management together into one centralized dashboard that provided relevant data to both IT managers and executives wanting a quick glance at the state of their core applications and the systems supporting them. Ken Meszaros, vice president of global networks at LandAmerica in Glenn Allen, Va., evaluated products from Netuitive and Opnet in an attempt to find a tool that would aggregate data from multiple management systems.

Specifically, Meszaros says he wanted to be able to compare real-time end-user transactions against synthetic application performance metrics and operational information.

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As LandAmerica Financial Group worked to centralize and streamline company title and escrow systems, IT leaders at the real estate transaction services company realized an investment in performance management software might be necessary to provide both executives and technicians with a comprehensive view of the environment.

The challenge LandAmerica faced involved bringing together numerous distributed approaches to performance management together into one centralized dashboard that provided relevant data to both IT managers and executives wanting a quick glance at the state of their core applications and the systems supporting them. Ken Meszaros, vice president of global networks at LandAmerica in Glenn Allen, Va., evaluated products from Netuitive and Opnet in an attempt to find a tool that would aggregate data from multiple management systems.

Specifically, Meszaros says he wanted to be able to compare real-time end-user transactions against synthetic application performance metrics and operational information.

"We need to be able to bubble up the overall system health for an executive based on key performance indicators for our applications," Meszaros explains. "I found that Opnet offers a more detail-oriented troubleshooting tool and Netuitive offers the high-level statistical analysis and trending capabilities, which is what we needed."

After evaluation, he decided to implement Netuitive's software because it not only could pull data from the existing Citrix, HP and NetScout Systems products he had in place, but also because the software is able to learn behavior patterns and alert on anomalies. Meszaros says that helps his staff naturally develop a baseline and establish thresholds without extensive configuration.

"The software allows us to look at the upper and lower levels of trends without requiring us to spend a lot of time plugging that type of information into the software," he says. While Netuitive currently integrates with HP, the company is working at building integrations into NetScout software to provide Meszaros with the complete view he feels is needed.

"We are on the verge of deploying it at an enterprise level, we will be using it much more in the next three to six months, but we are going to need to pull information from Microsoft, HP, NetScout and more to really get the overall picture of system health we want," he says.

The less time spent configuring the performance management software the better, Meszaros adds, especially because LandAmerica also plans to put Netuitive to work monitoring its virtual infrastructure. Keeping up with the "very large VMware environment" made up of somewhere between 700 and 800 virtual systems would be a challenge without such a tool.

"Considering between 30% and 40% of our environment is virtualized, this kind of tool is critical for us to understand how things are performing in that environment," he says.

For instance, Netuitive SI for VMware installs on a server and integrates with VMware's VirtualCenter. The software scans the customer environment for ESX servers and uses Virtual Center's configuration capabilities to learn the elements in the virtual environment. The software baselines behavior across physical and virtual machines, and can alert IT managers to anomalies in performance as many as two hours prior to an actual degradation, according to the company.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.