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If you're just getting back from summer vacation, be sure to check out this feature article written by Beth Schultz in Network World. In it, she details how Alaska Airlines is using the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system to more effectively perform root-cause analysis.
Like so many enterprise organizations these days, Alaska Airlines maintains a complex infrastructure where every transaction truly matters. Consequently, when things slow down or stop working all together, quickly identifying the root cause of an issue is directly tied to revenue. But rather than pointing fingers, Alaska's IT department now goes straight to the ExtraHop system to identify these root causes for faster remediation. As Alaska's director of IT operations, Chris Grey comments in the article:
"ExtraHop sits over our entire production network today and gives everybody the ability to dig into the same data using the same interface and tool set… It's plugging quite a few holes in visibility that we had had using perimeter monitoring and other specific tools."
Prior to using the ExtraHop system, Alaska Airlines' IT team first had to be aware that a problem was occurring (not as easy as it sounds), and then the IT team would use native operating system tools to manually assess the health of the infrastructure running their Informix database servers. To obtain specific transaction-level metrics, they had to turn on database profiling, a time consuming step to take in the production environment due to high performance overhead.
The ExtraHop system provides an integrated view across all tiers, and with the ExtraHop database module, Alaska Airlines' Informix databases could be observed continuously from a passive, zero-overhead perspective, with full-stream reassembly and full content analysis of the traffic to record both network- and application-level metrics. This information saved their IT team countless hours, providing proactive early warning of new problems and revealing the root causes of slowness and intermittent errors, all without the need for system-wide database profiling.
Do you have an anecdote regarding ExtraHop you would like to share? Tell us in the comments!
