Better Application Performance is the Best Policy

Picture this: more than 800 independent Farm Bureau Financial Services agents at 350 sites in the American Midwest, each accessing an important insurance application over a 56K frame relay network via NT servers connected to a mainframe host system. Now imagine some agents waiting not seconds, but minutes in some cases, to get the information they needed for their customers—or not getting access at all. For Terry Price, Director of Information Operations at Farm Bureau Financial Services, this was a problem he and his team wanted to fix—and fix quickly. The solution: Compuware's Application Vantage.

More than 75 years ago, Farm Bureau Financial Services began providing insurance and investment services for rural Farm Bureau Federation members. At that time, members were mostly farmers and ranchers in the American Midwest. Today, Farm Bureau Financial Services has grown to provide a wide variety of insurance and financial services for people and businesses not only in rural areas, but in suburban and metropolitan areas as well.

Today, more than 800 Farm Bureau Financial Services agents serve customers throughout the Midwest. Much of their ability to write insurance policies depends on having quick and timely access via desktop computers to Farm Bureau's mainframe-hosted insurance information. When agents noticed the application began slowing down, Farm Bureau's Information Operations group began looking into the problem.

"Simply put, the application just became very slow," said Price. "Our users were seeing large lag times from some transactions. But, due to the complex architecture of the application, it was very difficult for us to find the bottleneck. If our agents can't access insurance information, they can't write policies."

Searching for the Root Cause

Price's team could tell from the tool they had at the time, and from log files from the application itself, that there was a bottleneck somewhere. But the tools couldn't tell them where the problem was.

"We tried using a protocol analyzer to find out what was causing the timeouts," said Matt Evanson, a network services administrator. "The tool was doing exactly what it was supposed to do—we were looking at packet decodes from the analyzer. But to do that from all the different points of integration on this particular application, with multiple software platforms and infrastructures—it was going to take us a long time to find the cause.

"We were going through the application piece by piece, trying to do real-time troubleshooting. The cost of staff time alone meant this was quickly becoming an expensive problem to solve. That's when we called our Compuware rep and asked him to show us a demo of Application Vantage."

A Better Idea: Application Vantage

	"Knowledge is power. Using Application Vantage, we were able to determine what was working right with our application, and quickly pinpoint what wasn't working well—faster than we'd ever been able to before." —Terry Price, Director of Information Operations, Farm Bureau Financial Services

Application Vantage helps identify and resolve application performance problems in production. By providing detailed troubleshooting analysis for mission-critical applications, Application Vantage helps pinpoint the causes of poor end-user response times to the client, the network, a server or the application itself.

"We'd seen it rated highest in comparison to other application performance tools," said Evanson. "We told our rep, 'If Application Vantage can give us a better idea on where this problem is, we'd like to see it.'"

A short demo of Application Vantage captured some information from the application, but the team wanted more data. The team asked for a demo version of the product to use for one night. "This is where I became really impressed with the tool," said Evanson. "I watched the Compuware rep perform a couple of data captures, and they left the demo with us. I used the product that night, when I could work more easily with our application. Even though I had no training on it, I was able to use Application Vantage to narrow down where the bottleneck was."

The problem: Mid-tier servers were waiting a long time for the mainframe to complete a transaction and respond. The team took that information and dug deeper to find the specific bottleneck, which was a DNS lookup problem.

"Knowledge is power," said Price. "Using Application Vantage, we were able to determine what was working right with our application, and quickly pinpoint what wasn't working well—faster than we'd ever been able to before."

People Behind the Product

Application Vantage is now in use everyday at Farm Bureau to check the performance characteristics of applications in production and in development. Additionally, Farm Bureau Financial Services' mainframe developers obtained Compuware's STROBE software, which provides application performance data for mainframe environments.

"I use Application Vantage daily," said Todd Birkenholtz, network analyst. "When we installed it, we went through and baselined all our applications, to determine how they were working and to look for anomalies. Now we have a historical view of our apps. If one should begin to fail or cause problems, we can look back and see what's changed with the application and how changes to it are affecting network bandwidth."

Birkenholtz related an example of Application Vantage's benefits in action. "Recently, an office in Minnesota realized their people were getting dropped from the network. From our office here in West Des Moines, Iowa, we were able to find the problem with Application Vantage—a rogue DHCP server. Without Application Vantage, we would have had to fly up to Minneapolis and put an analyzer tool on their end of the network—and the office would probably be off the network for a couple of days. With Application Vantage, we fixed the problem in a matter of hours."

The ability of Application Vantage to find performance bottlenecks wasn't the only thing that impressed the team at Farm Bureau.

"I was impressed with Compuware's sales and support staff," said Price. "Not many companies would come in and do what they did. They brought in a demo for us to use, and they did it very, very quickly. To us, it was obvious that they were interested not only in selling us the product, but also solving our problem. And that has continued throughout our relationship. They're willing to listen to you and work with you. That's what can make or break a customer/vendor relationship, and I just can't stress that enough."