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Industry:
Public broadcasting
Customer:
Bayerischer Rundfunk
Challenge:
Staff at Bavarian broadcasting company,
Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), had to
battle with the same kind of IT
problems facing people in most other
companies, like sudden application
unavailability or ever slower response
times.
Because BR has a heterogeneous IT
infrastructure which has grown in
complexity over many years, it was no
longer possible to satisfactorily
monitor the service quality of
client/server applications and easily
identify the causes of problems in
performance. The broadcasting company
therefore wanted to find a solution
that would enable its IT staff to
continuously monitor system
performance, while ensuring detailed
error analysis on a case-by-case
basis.
Compuware
answer:
To tackle the problem of long response
times on the user side, BR is
installing Compuware ClientVantage to
monitor applications from the
user’s point of view. The
solution can be used to quickly and
easily identify and clear any problems
in performance.
Compuware solution
used:
ClientVantage
Compuware ClientVantage monitors the
performance of business-critical
applications at Bayerischer
Rundfunk.
The public broadcasting company
relies on ClientVantage to analyse
problems in performance in a
heterogeneous IT landscape from the
user’s point of view.
If IT applications take a long time
to respond or whole systems crash,
working hours are lost, which severely
impacts on productivity. This is just
as intolerable for a modern
broadcasting company as it is for
companies in other industries. Yet the
causes of performance problems are
often difficult to detect and
eliminate.
Bayerischer Rundfunk is one of the
largest broadcasting companies in
Germany. The public TV and radio
broadcaster has to struggle with
complex requirements in the field of
IT, with over 3,000 employees accessing
message routing systems, editing
systems, archiving applications, etc.
What’s more, BR has a
heterogeneous IT infrastructure, which
has grown in complexity over many
years. For example, different server
landscapes are used in various parts of
BR, such as Intel/Windows solutions,
Linux servers and also AIX systems.
This presented staff in BR’s IT
department with a tremendous challenge.
If problems occurred in the performance
of applications, it was barely possible
under these conditions to quickly and
easily pinpoint the causes of the poor
performance.
Spotlight on the end
user
To monitor the
performance of all applications and
respond to bottleneck messages more
quickly, the IT department dared to
take an unusual step. It reversed roles
and placed the spotlight on application
performance from the user’s point
of view. “We’ve already
tried special solutions to monitor our
servers and networks. But they
don’t allow us to picture things
from the user’s point of view.
And this is precisely what we wanted to
do, after all that’s where
problems first appear”, explains
Marcus Brückner, who is
responsible for the company’s IT
servers and systems.
In spring 2005, managers started to
look around for a suitable solution
that would be able to identify and
clear the existing problems. They drew
up a programme of requirements
specifying critical aspects that
absolutely had to be addressed by the
software. After sending out an
invitation to tender and going through
all the bids, BR started to meet with
reference customers. By September, the
managers had already made up their
minds, opting for ClientVantage from
Compuware. ClientVantage is a
professional solution to monitor
client/server applications from each
user’s desktop. It can be used to
monitor availability and response times
as actually experienced by users. The
solution offers various options to
analyse any problems that arise so that
sources of errors can be isolated with
maximum speed, greatly facilitating the
task of clearing the error.
Comprehensive performance
analysis
After opting for
Compuware, there were then further
decisions to be made: “When the
project kicked off, we first analysed
which servers we would initially
monitor and which PCs would have
measurement tools installed on
them”, explains Kay Galinsky,
project engineer at BR. The server
components were set up first of all,
followed by the measuring agents,
called probes. These are completely
normal PCs that run the operating
system and all major applications,
including patches and updates. They
reproduce the conditions experienced by
BR employees. ClientVantage was then
installed on the probes. Vantage
monitors and analyses all network
traffic and application
performance.
Working together with Compuware
experts, BR installed a total of eight
agents at the Munich radio centre and
Freimann TV site. The main applications
to be monitored were then identified.
This enables BR to record what happens
in and between applications, and this
measuring data can then be used to
produce reports on the distribution of
response times (of client, network and
server components).
Service level monitoring
with Vantage
But the
system also offers BR a whole host of
other advantages. IT managers can track
the current status of systems via a
web-based interface customised to the
design of the Bayerischer Rundfunk. If
agreed service levels are not met or if
systems fail, they can search for the
causes based on drill-down functions.
Another clear advantage of the solution
is that ClientVantage automatically
warns the necessary employees as soon
as any problems arise. The solution
therefore also acts as an early warning
system and can help to reduce or even
completely avoid loss or damage due to
errors in IT systems. The reporting
functions in the solution can also be
used to accurately track back errors
and problems retrospectively, thus
significantly reducing possible sources
of errors for future applications.
“Debugging operations used to
be one of our main problem areas, but
thanks to ClientVantage, they’re
quick and easy. We now have the
capability to proactively identify
errors and where necessary eliminate
them. This helps us to work more
efficiently and more
productively”, states
Brückner, summing up the
improvements with ClientVantage.
Key facts
Bayerischer Rundfunk
- Formed in 1922 as the
“Deutsche Stunde in Bayern.
Gesellschaft für drahtlose
Belehrung und Unterhaltung
mbH”, launching its first radio
channel in 1924
- Approximately 3,000 employees in
2005
- Channel output: approximately
45,000 hours of radio and 10,000
hours of television a year
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