Pinsent Masons Makes Use of Vantage to Troubleshoot Application Performance Problems

When the solicitors Pinsent merged with Masons, it created a UK top ten* law firm with over 1,500 staff in total. Faced with the challenge of integrating, consolidating and optimising IT environments the firm turned to Internetwork Management Systems (IMS) to implement Compuware’s Vantage suite of performance management tools.

The merger between Pinsent and Masons created a UK top ten* law firm with over 240 partners, a legal team of 900 people and over 1,500 staff in total. The newly formed Pinsent Masons has offices all over the UK as well as a series of strategic alliances across Europe. The company was faced with the challenge of bringing together two completely different networks in order to create an IT infrastructure that would support and drive the business forward.

Whilst the merger turned Pinsent Masons into a global top 100 law firm, virtually nothing about the two previous infrastructures, from the operating system through to the server configurations, were compatible. Yet the IT team needed to ensure that employees had access to the same applications and experienced the same performance levels that they had prior to the merger, as well as pinpointing and addressing any ongoing performance problems.

Without Vantage, we probably would have spent a lot of money on infrastructure and hardware, which would have done little to solve the problem.  —Jim Eblett Head of IT Infrastructure Services

Pinsent Masons enlisted the help of Internetwork Management Systems (IMS) who provided a performance management solution, which comprised tools from Compuware's Vantage Suite, via a Managed Consultative Service (MCS). The deployment of the tools, coupled with IMS' unique consultancy approach, has enabled Pinsent Masons to make pertinent business decisions, avoid unnecessary investment and thus allowed the company to successfully consolidate and optimize their IT systems. In addition, Pinsent Masons has been able to quickly find the root cause of any application performance problem as it has arisen.

Analyzing, consolidating and optimizing the environment

The tools that IMS implemented were Compuware ServerVantage, NetworkVantage and ApplicationVantage. ServerVantage provided proactive performance monitoring of the server farms, while NetworkVantage was used to proactively manage network and application traffic. ApplicationVantage was utilized by the IMS Consultants to resolve in depth issues flagged by the Vantage performance management solution. "The main problems that we experienced during the consolidation were linked to performance. However, the tools that we had inherited prior to implementing Vantage, weren't allowing us to pinpoint why people were experiencing these issues because they lacked the granular detail that we required to isolate and solve the issue. This led to lots of rumblings from employees along the lines of 'we never had these problems before the merger,' which obviously isn't helpful during an already difficult period," commented Jim Eblett, Head of IT Infrastructure Services, Pinsent Masons.

"There was also talk of servers being relocated in order to solve problems, which for my department would have been a huge hassle that ultimately would not have solved the problem at hand. Therefore what we needed, and what IMS provided, were consultants and tools to pinpoint individual and company wide problems, and thus enable us to make the right decisions about how to resolve them, rather than guessing what the answer would be."

The Compuware tools immediately identified several issues that were impacting the performance of the company's IT infrastructure. For example, a high number of employees were experiencing extended log on times. Using Network- Vantage, Pinsent Masons was able to see that where users had re-located or were visiting another office it became clear that some applications were being accessed across the WAN rather than the local server as expected, this was leading to considerable slow downs and in turn congesting the associated WAN links.

Other individual problems identified included several users carrying out unknown background data replication causing high volumes of network traffic and one user's computer in particular was causing 400MB of traffic every four hours across a 2MB WAN connection. Not only was the employee's computer coming to a standstill, but also so was everyone else's using that connection. Using Network-Vantage, Pinsent Masons was able to demonstrate that this performance problem was not a result of the merger, but caused by the computer creating data copies for absolutely no good reason.

The MCS from Internetwork Management Systems is also helping Pinsent Masons address ongoing issues that were not related to the merger. For example, when using a key business application users were experiencing significant delays.

Using the Vantage tools IMS identified that the problem stemmed from high processing times within the server hosting the application. It was shown that inefficient code and application design rather than network problems were the root cause of the poor user experience. By isolating the problem and providing information about it to the application vendor, IMS has been able to work with the vendor's programmers to tweak the application and optimize the code to address this issue. The vendor is making improvements to the application, which should see performance significantly improve and remove the system wait time, so frustrating to the users.

"The combination of IMS' consultancy skills and powerful performance analysis tools from Compuware has enabled us to move away from the traditional blame game and actually show both users, and the business, why performance problems are occurring and how to solve them. We have now adopted a more proactive approach to the performance of our IT and utilized these tools within the MCS solution to help us more effectively monitor how IT is performing for the business," commented Eblett. "IMS spent a lot of time with us showing us how to use the tools so that we got the best out of them. We are going to be utilizing their services again as we intend to use Vantage in a more 'hands on' fashion in the near future to further underpin our new proactive management approach to IT and ensure that our network is working for the business."

* Source - The Insider 250 (UK + Ireland) 02.08.2006