User fine-tunes app mgmt. with Netuitive

Michael Prewitt has NetIQ AppManager software to let him know when one of his 300 servers will not be able to handle application requests. The problem is the software alerts him just moments before a performance problem happens and when the server has already maxed out on CPU power.

Michael Prewitt has NetIQ AppManager software to let him know when one of his 300 servers will not be able to handle application requests. The problem is the software alerts him just moments before a performance problem happens and when the server has already maxed out on CPU power.

“I need to put hard numbers in the software to get alerted, and it’s either too low or too high to get the notice I want,” says Prewitt, a network engineer for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. Prewitt uses AppManager religiously and will continue to do so, but he needed to add a little boost to the software’s performance with add-on software from network analytics vendor Netuitive.

“Netuitive sits on top of AppManager and baselines our applications’ performance and then offers predictive alerts about two hours or so in advance of when a server might have a problem,” he says.

Netuitive SI is software used to set dynamic thresholds, the company says. It uses algorithms and mathematical statistics to determine the normal behavior of servers and applications and to forecast when performance will degrade. Netuitive says its software eliminates up to 99.5% of false-positive alerts, which occur when static thresholds are set manually. Prewitt says the software used his team’s pre-written scripts and data collected by NetIQ AppManager agents to establish a database. After a couple of weeks, the software had established a baseline of his application and server infrastructure’s normal operations.

“The longer we use it, the more it learns,” Prewitt adds.

Netuitive SI runs on the same server as AppManager and creates its own database of application and system performance metrics relevant to the customer network. For example, it could tell you a specific Windows server might get overloaded on Tuesday due to an uptick in Active Directory use. The software alerts when problems might arise.

“It will forecast what we need to do ahead of time to get optimized performance out of specific systems,” Prewitt says.