Empowering Global Enterprise
Business Cloud Service and Security
Management
Empowering Global Enterprise
Business Cloud Service and Security
Management
A CleverView for cTrace Analysis Case Study
AES - the Business Service Management Company
A Large Health Services Entity Based on the West Coast
As a healthcare provider, their clients are far-reaching and have a wide range of technology backgrounds and budgets. These clients range from hospitals to doctors, offices, clinics, and individual users, so acquiring specific software to suit all of their needs is impossible. The best that can be done is to set guidelines and recommend software that is known to adhere to industry standards.
The overall system had both real-time system updates and batched updates that were sent from the client sites to the main data center. Standard FTP (File Transfer Protocol) transfer software was used for the batched data that would be sent at close of business each day to the healthcare provider. From most offices these data were transmitted in one hour with no problems.
With no known data center host system changes, the mainframe began behaving very erratically with slower and slower response times, which became evident when using the CleverView for TCP/IP monitoring tool. There was a ripple effect with the slowdown impacting more and more socket-based mainframe applications and subsystems. A pattern emerged showing the slowdown occurred between 7:30pm and 9:00pm (Pacific Standard Time) Monday through Friday. The operations center knew they had a problem on their hands.
Using CleverView for TCP/IP historical reports and investigating system logs, key discoveries were made including
- identification of FTP as the offending application environment,
- dramatic decreases of ECSA storage (at this time socket control blocks were part of ECSA),
- socket control blocks that were dropping to zero (all socket connections were then blocked),
- discovery of the offending system location to be in an office in Honolulu, HI.