Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: I need financial justification for any software or service I intend to purchase. What are the various ways in which the Ban Bottlenecks service can save me money?
A: Experience with our current customers has demonstrated that using the service can save you money in four different ways:
- By eliminating the need for your people to collect, analyze and present this data (a very tedious job), we free up your resources to work on projects directly related to your core business;
- By spotting and rectifying worrisome trends before they become incidents, we prevent the monetary losses associated with downtime on your systems;
- By analyzing the effectiveness of your operation vs. your peers, we suggest improvements that allow you to ‘buy back’ processing cycles on your current systems;
- By alerting you to anticipated system capacity needs, we improve your long-term decision-making and reduce the cost of capital by allowing a rational integration into your capital-budgeting cycle.
Q: Different functional areas in our organization may be interested in this information. Are your reports created for a management or technical audience?
A: Actually, they’re created for both audiences. The first section is an executive summary with report cards that acts as a quick review for management. Each line represents a functional area of your system that we review. The grades are based on our experience with your and others' systems. Many of our clients look at the Report Card, and if all the grades are A's and B's, and there are no incidents reported, they close the report and put it on the shelf. However, if there are incidents or grades lower than a B, then we suggest that a member of your technical team review the issues or concerns we have raised.
We do create specialized "Executive Summary" reports for our clients to their specifications. Our software allows us to "slice and dice" the data to provide the information requested in the desired format.
Q: I like the idea of a grading process. That gives me something to focus on each month. But how much faith can I have in an automated grading system?
A: We talk a lot about the ‘process’ we put in place here at TDI to pull and analyze various system metrics. We believe that grading systems must take into account many factors and various site-dependent issues. The grades are not automated. They’re assigned by our analyst and reflect the site's performance vs. previous months and vs. similar systems.
Q: Sometimes these programs that collect data to ostensibly help manage performance on a busy system actually end up exacerbating the situation by chewing up valuable processing power. What can we expect from Ban Bottlenecks?
A: Ban Bottlenecks requires negligible CPU cycles. We strictly adhere to the rule “Don't become part of the problem!” We back up those words by providing in our monthly reports a section that details the resources our tools are consuming. Our service will require some disk space, the actual amount of which will vary depending on your configuration. Each overnight we report on the data collected over the previous 24 hours. We typically maintain 35 days of logs on your system, while keeping 25 months of data on ours.
Q: We have really strict system access policies, especially where vendors are concerned. Do you need a connection to our system?
A: No, we don't require a connection to your site to perform the Ban Bottlenecks service. Without a connection, you will need to email or FTP us less than 1.0 MB of data each week from each system. If you allow us a connection, we can do our work without interrupting your staff. Of course, we follow your security procedures.
Q: We already have a product in place that monitors our system. So why do I need you?
A: Our service is a forward-looking planning tool, not a real-time system monitor. These two pieces are complementary in nature. You need them both.
“Capacity management is not a video game.” There are plenty of tools out there on various operating platforms that can accurately tell you what your system is doing right now. We firmly believe that none of these real-time tools is capable of correlating all of the factors – Application, CPU, memory, disk, communication, etc. – that go into an all-inclusive capacity management program. These tools don’t tell you whether or not you’ll make it through your next peak period. They don’t give you a vehicle for effective communication with your budgeting and marketing teams. They don’t tell you when to make your next hardware purchase. Our service is all about making you a proactive, rather than reactive, manager.
Q: I talked to my vendor about this monitoring package that we already bought from them, and they say I can do the same type of thing you’re offering using their package. So why do I need your service?
A: Of course you can do what we do. For those packages that get installed, the battle has just begun. Now you need to warehouse all the data, do the analysis, make a series of recommendations, and – most importantly – do this consistently, month in, month out. If you’re doing that already, then…great! There really is no room for us to provide value at your site.
But we find these situations are far from the norm. There’s no doubt that most of our clients have the capability to do this stuff. But they’ve recognized what we’ve been preaching all along: that it all comes down to core competencies. Most of our clients had some type of capacity management program in place, but they were not able to do the required work consistently. This is one arena in which the foremost factor of success is regularity.
This issue strikes at the heart of why we offer Ban Bottlenecks as a service, not a product. Your core competency is supporting your unique business, be it selling music CDs, offering banking services through ATMs, or providing payment alternatives at the point-of-sale. Your chief responsibility as an IT executive should be focused on helping your marketing team implement new, profit-creating initiatives. So you’re going to tell your marketing whiz (in effect), “Sorry, I can’t make that date because Joe needs to tabulate last month’s stats.” Hardly! Our line of business is capacity auditing. Let us do it for you. We can do it much more cost effectively than your internal resources can.
Q: We have an internal group that does all of my capacity management for me. So why do I need your service?
A: Okay, they ‘do' your capacity management, but do they really understand your transaction system? Many times, the answer we get back when we ask that question is a chuckle and an emphatic ‘No!' That's because you're managing a unique transaction-based platform, while your in-house capacity experts are schooled in capacity management techniques learned in conjunction with batch or shared mainframes, LANs or generic UNIX boxes.
Our expertise began with and continues to be centered on transaction processing environments. Furthermore, we believe that true capacity analysis must be comprised of a holistic approach to a system, one that looks at the base system and the application it runs as an integrated package. From that standpoint, we’ve worked with many of the popular application vendors to incorporate data from their log files and statistics. The result is reports and recommendations related in a language with which you are familiar. Furthermore, we can refine our analysis by comparing your performance vs. your peers who run a similar configuration.
Q: So you give me a report each month recapping last month’s performance. Well, we had a problem this morning. What can you tell me about that?
A: Underpinning our service is the TDI Toolkit®, a program suite which runs on your system to collect the data we need to do our analysis. The TDI Toolkit® is also accessible by you to take looks at recent events. For example, your system may have slowed down this morning from 7:30 to 8:30 AM. You can use the Toolkit to run an in-depth report that details exactly what was going on during that time period. Which process was sucking up CPU? Who was slamming the disks? We’ve captured all the info for you to play back and analyze. You can also call us and tip us off about these worrisome events and we’ll pay special attention to them during our next report generation period. Or, if you request, we can analyze the problem for you on a T&M basis.
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