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Sky Mexico Uses meshIQ for Realtime Proactive Monitoring

Sky Mexico solved their real-time proactive monitoring requirements with meshIQ.

Sky Mexico Uses meshIQ AutoPilot for Realtime Proactive Monitoring

Sky Mexico uses meshIQ for Realtime Proactive Monitoring

The Problem

As with most industries, a weak global economy intensified the importance of stellar customer support and the need to reduce operational costs.

Competition-driven business pressures, combined with an overall need to bolster internal operational efficiencies, required a robust monitoring technology to ensure the availability and performance of the applications required for business growth and the company health.

SKY Mexico began a search for a solution to monitor its DTH satellite television service to stay ahead of competitors with respect to quality of service and agility, minimizing operational expenses in the process.

Challenges

SKY Mexico’s primary IT problem also was its chief business challenge: the need to utilize the most inno­vative technology to deliver both the most advanced DTH transmission and the fastest, most-responsive customer service, so there would be no impediments to expanding into new markets.

This was a major struggle for SKY Mexico due to its lack of an effective system to monitor its Windows and UNIX-based IT applications, resulting in uncer­tainty and doubt related to the status of ERP, CRM, billing, IVR, provisioning, and other business and IT transactions.

In addition, sub-standard application performance was leading to online order fallouts (i.e., lost orders) and an inability to meet all service level agreements (SLAs). When these factors were combined the net result was an excessive and unbalanced workload placed on SKY’s IT pros—they were preoccupied with chasing problem resolutions rather than developing new services vital for competing against rival busi­nesses.

SKY’s reputation for customer service, public image, ability to build new services, and revenue growth goals were all jeopardized because of its lack of an effective, proactive application monitoring solution.

Overview

The Solution

Following the testing and review of various monitor­ing solutions, SKY Mexico engaged reseller BizPro to install meshIQ Technologies’ AutoPilot.

The company chose AutoPilot because of its single dashboard, real-time view of all commercial applica­tions and transactions, servers, and middleware, as well as its ability to automatically discover and issue alerts related to applications- and transaction-related problems.

Among other capabilities, AutoPilot would provide real-time business status to prevent costly SLA violations tied to ERP, CRM, billing, IVR and satellite provisioning applications. SKY Mexico needed a scalable solution to support the monitoring of customers-centric services, including online and batch business transactions, Java and .NET Method, database calls and payload contents, as well as future applications.

AutoPilot’s Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine would be put to work watching for problems that could impact online DTH subscriber activations, warehouse operations, billing, satellite provisioning and other business transactions before those issues could impact customers.

BizPro created and applied probes and experts to support all SKY Mexico applications, among others the SAP order management system and Siebel CRM. They continually monitored multi-platform server and software vital signs, enabling SKY — via a single dynamic dashboard view — to analyze the root causes of faults, add triple-play services, and access every transaction in real-time.

Results

SKY Mexico’s technical staff’s gained much greater knowledge about the relationship between various hardware and applications-related components and processes. AutoPilot also improved the company’s anticipation of problems and capacity planning process, specifically the comparison of traffic and utilization required to achieve better load balance.

MTTR

As SKY’s IT group looked further into the situa­tion, they discovered that far too many application problems were being uncovered by users before IT support was even aware of them. Customers, rather than IT staff, were identifying nearly two-thirds of all problems.

The mean-time-to-know (MTTK) about a problem was unacceptably long. As a result, the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) became excessive with a backlog of service desk tickets. All of this created a significant impact on SKY Mexico’s bottom-line.

The number of order fallouts was troublesome, to say the least, with little-to-no system visibility of business and IT transactions. In the DTH industry — character­ized by an average of more than a quarter of online customer orders being lost, stalled, or inaccurately stored—SKY Mexico’s ability to gain a firmer grasp on this information would directly translate into a more competitive market position.

AutoPilot’s CEP engine significantly reduced SKY Mexico’s mean-time-to-know and the mean-time-to-repair, resulting in markedly improved customer service. With the enhanced transaction visibility AutoPilot provided, SKY could answer the simplest but most important of customer questions: “Where is my order?” From a cost-savings perspective, AutoPilot reduced SKY Mexico’s total number of help desk tickets by 30-percent, the number of problems requiring the most-expensive Tier 3 support by 70-percent, and improved mean-time-to-repair by 45-percent. AutoPilot’s grid capabilities, as well as its transparent scalability, easily accommodated additional loads required for triple-play service and will provide the necessary bandwidth for future enhancements as part of SKY Mexico’s ongoing IT performance assess­ment and improvement.