January 28, 2021

Alexander Forbes

Alexander Forbes is a South African financial services organization with over 1.3 million customers.

780 services managed

40+ end-users who consume SquaredUp

Our main monitoring goal is to bring the networking, APM and event monitoring components under one pane for a centralized view. We wanted the tool with top performance and functionality. Therefore, we chose SquaredUp.

Mohammed Sahib

Alexander Forbes, IT Monitoring Specialist Head

The Problem:

Having used SCOM for 6 years, Mohammed and his infrastructure and application monitoring team needed a single-pane-of-glass dashboarding tool that was quick and easy to use with lots of useful features. Their previous dashboarding tool, Savision LiveMaps, had fallen short.

We noticed performance issues, and the functionality of the tool was limited. SquaredUp quickly filled this gap.

The Solution

Let’s take a look at what Mohammed has to say about how things changed when Alexander Forbes switched from LiveMaps to SquaredUp.

1. Improved performance

“LiveMaps had many performance issues. Using the Authoring console was so resource-intensive that it slowed down our SCOM console drastically. We had to wait until the later hours of the day to create dashboards, when there were fewer users on SCOM.”

“The SquaredUp dashboard designer on the other hand is quick and so simple to use. It loads up quickly. Very user-friendly.”

2. Able to view long-term performance data

“We tried using LiveMaps for viewing long-term performance data but, when trying to run reports, it used to hammer our SQL database. Instead of looking at performance data for a month, we could go no longer than four or five days.”

“With SquaredUp, the performance data comes from the data warehouse so we can now view and compare all the performance data we had for objects – for up to a year! It’s much faster, doesn’t hammer the SQL database, and it’s so easy that any of our users can do it. Plus, there’s a one-click export to Excel.”

3. More functionality

“With our previous platform, we only had a select few widgets for displaying performance counters. More importantly, we could never export data from SCOM, compare values for SQL performance counters, or execute agent tasks.

“We can now do all that with SquaredUp – export data from SCOM, compare values for SQL performance counters, and execute agent task. Also, the functionality of the reporting widgets is phenomenal, especially when comparing values. You can scope the widgets better.”

4. Precise data

“In LiveMaps, the availability was based on all three components: end-user, application and infrastructure. This is incorrect because only the end-user component is supposed to affect availability.”

“The reporting functionality of the EAM is precise as the SLA’s only governed for the availability component.”

Top 3 SquaredUp features: EAM, Reporting, SLAs

Mohammed’s top three SquaredUp features are the EAM, the reporting, and the SLAs, his favourite being the EAM.

“The feature I found the most useful is EAM, the enterprise application monitoring tool for designing distributed applications. It made my job significantly easier as I could use VADA to automatically map out the applications.”