Business Case
TCS – Nabil Berreghioua
Improving business performance by
focusing upon end-user experience
With 1.6 million members, the Touring Club of Switzerland is the
leading organization in Switzerland active in the areas of assistance
to persons and vehicles. Its 220 patrol officers carry nearly 300,000
repairs per year and can hit the road immediately in 86% of cases.
Nearly 700,000 people have confidence in ETI Booklet repatriating in
Switzerland more than 700 people and 3,000 vehicles per year.
T
CS decided to take proactive action
following an increase in user
complaints and the occurrence of
incidents. TCS sought to guarantee
its users (internal users or external clients)
the best possible application performance
and to ensure such incidents did not affect
overall business performance.
Context
Although TCS was already equipped with
a range of specialized tools such as
Nagios to monitor its network and IT
system, these traditional QoS monitoring
tools failed to detect such incidents whilst
indicating that individual components were
performing well “green lights/service up”.
This approach thus proved to be
insufficient due to the limitations of
protocol tests with Nagios with the enduser experience not being monitored.
Moreover, it was very difficult to identify
the origin of the complaints and the current
tools failed to check if the production
environment was working correctly.
Consequently TCS looked to implement a
solution to monitor the end-user
experience (QoE) across the whole of the
delivery chain to complement and
complete their current monitoring tools.
TCS also wished to set up automatic SLA
reporting with internal business clients
notably for business units that directly
generate revenues (sales, customer
support and assistance).
Critical applications with various interfaces
TCS chose the Newtest solution thanks to
its ability to proactively monitor end-to-end
application performance from an end-user
perspective for all types of business critical
applications. TCS wished to monitor a
range of applications used by internal and
external customers. These included web
client applications (e.g. purchasing a
product on TCS’s website), SAP with a fat
client access, as well as Salesforce.com
used
by
internal
customers.
One of the challenges was to monitor an
especially sensitive application developed
in-house with access via Java client. This
application concerns a customer request
management system used by agents
taking calls from TCS’s final customers
who have experienced vehicle breakdown
and thus require urgent assistance.
“Only Newtest was able to provide a
true end-user vision for this
application, we tested other solutions
but only Newtest was able to handle all
of our applications”.
Newtest
implementation
at
TCS
All of the critical applications are
monitored across 3 strategic locations in
Switzerland corresponding to TCS’s all
important call centres. A Newtest Robot is
located at each site and fulfils TCS desire
to automate end-user quality tests to run
24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Prior to
adopting Newtest, TCS carried out tests
manually every morning at 7am. Newtest
Robots launch scenarios at regular
intervals enabling TCS to compare
response time differences and detect
bottlenecks across their sites to isolate
performance issues. Newtest also
provides flexibility via to the Test on
Request Robot allowing additional and
complementary scenarios to be triggered
upon request to establish more precise
diagnosis in case of incidents.
“When everything is green
thanks to Newtest we are
now fully reassured that
everything is working fine
A-to-Z.
If there are any problems
we can now be much
more proactive in terms of
root cause analysis to
launch our recovery plan
before the end users
complain. We can
proactively inform our
helpdesk about issues thus
improving overall
communications and
limiting the impact upon
our business”.
Tel : +33 (0)1 77 49 53 00 | Fax : +33 (0)1 49 64 03 80 | www.ip-label.com
Headquarters : 90 bd National | 92250 La-Garenne-Colombes | France
Nabil Berreghioua
Head of Operations
Business Case
TCS - Nabil Berreghioua
an all-in-one real time monitoring console including networks, systems and application
status. Ironically, Newtest is now used for end-toend applicative tests as well as protocol tests like
SOAP for Web Services, as it provides
complementary information to Nagios across
TCS’s 3 strategic locations, as well as providing
The reasons for choosing Newtest
graphics for response times which facilitate
During a successful proof of concept, TCS reporting to senior management.
found Newtest easy to set-up and especially
appreciated its user-friendly approach
facilitating for example the scripting of
scenarios. Newtest was also noted for its
effectiveness in simulating usage from the
SAP fat client and Java client of the customer
request management system. The initial outlay
was seen as competitive with respect to other
solutions.
“Installation was complete within just 3
days, plus 2 days to train the IT team after
which the solution was fully operational in
our environment - internal user vision of an
entire range of web and business
applications
for
3
main
sites”.
Newtest also caters for round-the-world
coverage of monitoring needs in the short
term (web and business applications),
medium term (IP telephony and unified
communications) and long term (iPhone
applications).
Newtest & Nagios: a unique QoS/QoE solution
The fact that Newtest is an open solution and
can be easily integrated with Nagios provides
value added to TCS. “The Newtest plug-in for
Nagios is well documented and the integration
was trouble free and easy - we needed no
specific knowledge of Nagios or Linux”.
This interface between the 2 solutions offers a
high value solution to traditional Nagios users
(system specialists) by changing Nagios into
Newtest has been widely adopted by application
specialists thanks to the Newtest Operation
Portal. “This portal provides a clear and
synthetic real time vision of end-user
performance at a glance; it is our reference in
terms of application performance.”
The NOP offer allows actions can to be carried
out centrally for example to suspend scenarios
or Robots covering one or all of the 3 sites.
Finally, Newtest also gained legitimacy with
business decision makers. Every Monday
morning a Report is generated specifically to
follow-up SLA’s which are reviewed by senior
managers including different responses times
between the 3 sites based on Newtest data
(trends, response times, performance).
Major Benefits
Newtest has proved to be an essential tool
with multiple usages. These include alerting
and diagnostics adapted for 1st tier
helpdesk (support level 1), systems and
application specialists (Level 2 and 3) as
well as SLA reporting to business
management. The Helpdesk relies on
Newtest to detect who is impacted by
problems and whether these are isolated or
general trends depending upon which sites
are impacted. Moreover the synergy
between the Nagios console (used by the
systems specialists) and the Newtest
Operation Portal (used by application
specialists) provides a truly holistic view of
performance.
Future Plans
TCS intention is to monitor more critical
applications with Newtest in the future
including: voice quality as part of the
deployment of Alcatel ToIP solution and
iPhone applications. Moreover, TCS would
also like to benefit from the Newtest Hosted
Offer, which would enable to monitor access
performance to Salesforce.com as it is
perceived by nomadic employees and teleworkers connected via the internet. The
Newtest Hosted offer actually gives the
possibility to deploy active probes outside
the company, with direct connection to
major public internet backbones like
Swisscom.
The Challenge…
>> The Need
To guarantee internal and external
users performance & availability of
business critical applications.
>> Solution
Newtest for Active Monitoring
>> Scope
24/7 proactive monitoring of response times and
availability of business-critical applications from an enduser perspective across 3 strategic sites in Switzerland.
TCS
>> Sector
Insurance & Assistance
>> Website
www.tcs.ch
>> Benefits
• Objectively measures response times and availability across 3 main sites
• Perfect integration with Nagios and current IT environment
• Provides a true end-user vision (graphically reproducing exactly what is happening on the end-user’s screen - keyboard & mouse movements).
• A combined QoS et QoE solution for a complete performance view.
Tel : +33 (0)1 77 49 53 00 | Fax : +33 (0)1 49 64 03 80 | www.ip-label.com
Headquarters : 90 bd National | 92250 La-Garenne-Colombes | France