On going successes with a large mining company

A large mining company adopted Captell initially for use in generating capacity management reports for the 4,500+ wintel servers in their network.  They utilis SCOM for monitoring and had a data warehouse of over 1 billion records.  Utilising the Captell sample database our consultants processed all the data in their SCOM database to produce detailed reports on each server along with business unit summaries that grouped server utilisation by business unit.

Following on from the capacity reporting success the client has reengaged our services to implement reporting across a broad range of IT Service management areas such as providing:

• a dashboard style report to each business unit in the group, see a sample here .
• a global view various aspects of IT service delivery, see a sample here .
• an availability and capacity report that reports service level against their global service catalogue, see a sample here .

We continue to be engaged by this client to provide advice and deliver quality IT service maangement reporting.

Captell and the Department of Veterans' Affairs

Over the last 22 months we've been able to set up reporting for our Mainframe, Windows (incl VMWare servers), AIX and WAN and LAN infrastructure.  On each of these platforms we have been able to implement reporting, using a variety of sources, and written reporting for daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly intervals - including a range of parameter driven reports that help with problem diagnosis. 

I have received very positive feedback from our front-line technical support.  Captell's support for automation has saved me an enormous amount of time.  Once a report has been set up it requires no further effort - data collection, retention and publication & delivery are all taken care of so I am able to spend much more time on high-value work rather than 'housekeeping' existing systems.  This has helped to identify opportunities for cost-reduction as well as service improvement. 

One unexpected benefit of our approach is that we can capture and analyse high granularity data.  Because of the aggregation hierarchy designed into many off-the-shelf monitors we found it difficult to identify problems once the data was more than a few days old because the monitor had started aggregating to hourly average values.  Through the use of high frequency data over longer periods, better statistical techniques and more high-value analysis time, we have been able to identify capacity and performance problems previously undetected. 

I believe our investment in Captell has proven very successful.

Roger Stenlake
ICT Capacity Planner
Dept Veterans' Affairs
Mob +61 (0)417 669 626
Email roger.stenlake@dva.gov.au

Medicare Australia's use of the Captell System

On 23 April 2008 Medicare Australia engaged Captell Developments [now ITSM Reporting Services] to audit its storage and application servers to ensure that they were performing at full capacity and were being wholly utilised.

“We used the [Captell] system to understand how money can be saved and services improved, resulting in a stream of benefits for all of Medicare Australia stakeholders.” Medicare Australia IT Operations Manager

Medicare Australia IT Operations Manager praised the outcomes of the audit “The data obtained from the Captell audit provided the basis for future planning, and ensured that best value could be derived from the IT infrastructure and sharper internal processes could be rolled out for capacity management, configuration management and availability management ”.  Read the full story here .

Cost reduction

A moderately sized federal government department running their mainframe at 100%, 24 hours per day for 6 and a half days per week were looking at a very expensive upgrade.   Not so much in terms of CPU but the associated increase in software costs, these were a killer.  Utilising regular reporting with a focus on the cost of resource consumption they were able to target tuning efforts and 2 years later they are still running on the same hardware with an average utilisation of around 70 – 80%. 

Managing Windows Server farm running BMC patrol data collectors

A large financial institution with some 250 – 300 Wintel servers had little visibility of the performance and capacity utilisation of their server farm.  Performance problems were sometimes simply resolved with a processor upgrade.  Implementing automated data collection using BMC Patrol and Patrol Express clients and utilising the Captell reporting system provided the knowledge they needed to more accurately manage their environment.  During actual report implementation a server suffering performance problems was identified, the initial thought was that the server was CPU constrained; the report revealed that a single disk was experiencing extremely high IO rates which were the actual cause of the performance issue.

Improving reliability and performance of the Capacity Reporting facilities

Another federal government department with quite comprehensive existing reporting facilities found their reports were taking considerable time in production with little time for analysis.  The reporting facilities occasionally suffered failures which further increased the time for delivery or produced inaccurate reports.  Adopting Captell they found the accuracy and reliability of their reporting infrastructure increased and reports that normally took 10 hours to produce were now produced in less than 2 hours.  The extra time could now be spent analysing the report data and providing much needed report enhancements.

 Large Windows server farm running Mercury Sitescope monitoring

An organisation with some 1000+ servers in their Windows environment had little or no visibility of the activities occurring in their server farm.  Running the Mercury Sitescope monitors gave them performance and capacity data; however, little could be done with this enormous volume.  During a 3 day trial period our consultants were able to process the Sitescope data and generate comprehensive reports for their environment.  These reports included a summary report which identifies servers that may be of interest; high CPU utilisation, paging activity or low disk space etc.  This short list provided input to the secondary reports which provided much more detail on the activities being carried out on these servers of interest.

Asset management reporting for an outsourced client

A license to use Captell was acquired by a large outsourcing firm to provide asset management reports back to one of the organisations they provide IT management services to.  This involved implementing Captell to process data from Tivoli, SMS, Spread sheets, CSV files and SAP to ultimately produce a list of network hardware and software assets under management.  The asset records were classified to the clients organisational structure and included the cost to the client.  The Captell web interface was used to deliver dynamic reports back to the client from the outsourcer and allowed the client to verify the outsourcer's monthly invoice and to manage their network assets in a much better fashion.  Network assets included, PCs, Laptops, Printers and other peripherals, Network switches and routers, and servers.