Seattle Children's Hospital seeks IT management cure with CA software

Wes Wright realized to achieve complete visibility of his organization’s application stack and gain insight into end-to-end performance from the user perspective that he would have to overhaul the monitoring tools at Seattle Children’s Hospital in Wash.

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The vice president and chief technology officer had past experience with Concord Communications’ technology and a slew of engineers from management software maker CA, which acquired Concord, in the neighborhood. He decided to invest with the vendor to overhaul Seattle Children’s Hospital monitoring systems. Moving from a scattered approach using multiple tools from Cisco to WhatsUp Gold, Wright installed CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager (formerly an Aprisma technology) and CA eHealth Performance Manager (an evolution of previous Concord products). CA also recently acquired more network management capabilities with NetQoS. 

“We are building an application stack that will monitor both the network viability of getting to the application and putting a system in place that will tell us not only is the network alive but are the applications alive,” Wright says. “We realized we needed to overhaul and turn around the operation so we could be proactive and move away from being reactive, so we could understand the health of the enterprise vs. just the health of the network.”

With all the network switches, routers, wireless access points and other devices monitoring, Wright says the next move was to monitor an application stack to see the end-user experience through the network. His goal is to see what the clinician sees when working with medical systems supported by the IT infrastructure. “Because if I can see it before the clinician can see it, then I can hopefully and theoretically prevent any interruption to his or her workflow,” Wright explains.

Currently working to build an application stack for the images from the MRI and other medical systems, Wright will then ensure Seattle Children’s patient care applications are monitored by CA tools as well. The goal is to have each group monitoring systems in a standard way.

“We are establishing a standard reliable method for work. If I know what each of my folks is using to monitor their applications and the capabilities of the tools, then I know we are working in a standard way. That is the grand goal,” Wright says.

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Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.