Monitoring those troublesome apps - St. Laurent Paper Products Corp is using Empirical Software's Empirical Director and TPM 97 management tools - Company Operations - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Nov, 1997 by Daniela Cimino

At St. Laurent Paper Products Corp., a West Point, Va., paper mill, DBA Vic Galloway and his15 member IT team have their hands full. Currently in the midst of migrating from a mainframe environment to client/server, the last thing they want to worry about is the performance of their mission-critical PeopleSoft and Immpower applications.

"We've got so much to do now that it really looked like we had to have the help," says Galloway. IT's recurring nightmare? The prolonged downtime of the mill's three paper-producing machines. Since Immpower lets the mill schedule maintenance and track repairs, any performance problems affects productivity.

To avoid potential disasters, the IT team has installed Empirical Director and TPM 97 service-level management tools from Empirical Software to help monitor its applications. While Empirical Director identifies problems and recommends possible solutions, TPM 97 drills down and resolves them. IT team members is using TPM to monitor apps while they familiarize themselves with Enterprise Director.

According to Empirical CEO Tom Bandy, SLM tools help companies like St. Laurent meet established service-level agreements. "The most important thing that people often forget is that you don't achieve 99.5% uptime by responding to problems very quickly," he says. "You have to plan and project forward."