Sysload via PTC has boosted ROI and saved staff costs at York CC. It has also improved performance, capability and capacity management.

The IT Infrastructure team at the City of York Council is good at their jobs.  They have to be. Providing IT services for a modern, busy local authority is no mean feat and certainly no nine to five, five days a week operation. For the world of local government is being transformed by the digital revolution and the demands of e-government.

IT Services Manager Alaister Boyd and his 14 staff are responsible for ensuring that the computing systems that keep services running at one of the country's most forward thinking authorities are operational during SLA hours, and often for 24 hours, each and every day. The scale of the task that York and indeed many councils face would surprise many people.  The technological infrastructure needed to keep a Unitary Authority going is massive. The council has over 6,000 staff with 3,000 IT users, who need to have job-critical information a mouse click away. IT services are provided to 6 organizational departments across 134 sites within the city. At any given time, more than 60 centrally supported IT services and 80 service delivery projects are being managed. These are powered by the council's 106 computer servers, including a large Citrix Metaframe Server Based Computing Solution deploying some 100 applications to 95% of the user base as well as 30 production Oracle and Microsoft SQL servers. These systems operate mostly in a Windows environment, with some critical financial and management systems using Solaris UNIX.

Alaister's philosophy for keeping the IT systems up and running is that he and his colleagues should be pro-active rather than reactive. "I would rather deal with a problem before it causes disruption, rather than waiting for something to go wrong and get a flood of calls," he says. But problems back in 2001 made the council realize that they had no easy way of monitoring the computer system performance and health. This resulted in significant delays in diagnosing the root causes of the problem which hit the local press headlines.

Additionally, decisions to upgrade or replace hardware were frequently based on poor information. “I had no real-time system status view and no time to perform proactive maintenance and health reviews.  There was little to no information with which to perform capacity, performance and capability reviews and management. As a result, problem diagnosis was always delayed.  This caused us serious problems as our customers had a poor perception of how we managed their system.  What we wanted was a system that would enable us to operate our business, the provision of computer services to the City of York in a more cost-effective manner.  We chose PTC Sysload because it helps my team perform health and performance reviews and assists in identifying potential problems before users are affected.”

“Sysload is a comprehensive server performance monitoring solution for operating systems, databases and applications.  Its benefits are that it provides a view of server health against pre-defined conditions and coupled with another product, PTC Alerts, allows us to respond to incidents more effectively through alert management and the automatic generation of SMS, voice and e-mail notifications to the right staff at the right time. We now know when customers are likely to be having problems before they call.”

“Sysload also generates regular reports on how systems are operating.  This prevents unnecessary service downtime and other problems.  The early detection of problems allows fixes to be scheduled outside service level agreement hours.  This means we have real-time notification of heavy system loads.  Thanks to Sysload, server health reviews can be done with minimal manpower.  This improves our ability to assess server workloads and capacity, including growth of use or opportunities for consolidation” he says.

However, the Council had to show that there was a good business case for investing in Sysload. Alaister says: “Local authorities are often starved for staff and revenue so we cannot buy a system just because we like the sound of it.  I had to be able to show that there would be a return on investment and that there would be quantifiable and qualifiable outcomes.  The council's business case for investment in Sysload is  that it will save the council from having to employ two staff members that would be needed to boost resources to manually do the monitoring and that the accuracy of the information generated would allow better decisions on equipment upgrades or replacement to be made.”

Alaister continues, “The key to successful performance monitoring is to recognize critical conditions before they turn into problems. Sysload is able to create complex event models that improve accuracy of detection.  It also provides customizable event messages to alert us of a problem.  Additionally, Sysload is a lower cost solution than others we assessed.  Within three months of fully installing Sysload we were starting to show a real return on investment as it identified seven servers that were low in memory, three servers with subtle network errors causing performance degradation and two servers with disk sub-system problems.  Sysload pinpointed three poorly performing servers and two server replacements were avoided.”

But Alaister is quick to point out that Sysload isn't a substitute for good, committed IT staff.  It does not and must not de-skill or reduce the value of staff.  On the contrary, it enhances their role, by giving them the right information at the right time so they can make better decisions. Sysload should save hundreds of man hours that would be spent checking systems.
“The Sysload AES function, and other system performance reports provide us with a health check for each server and it is this information that enables us to make a decision based on real information about whether a £1,000 memory upgrade as opposed to replacement at £6,000 is needed.”
“My team needs to know what is happening in real-time and Sysload provides us with targeted information, leaving us to decide how best to respond.  Over three months we have avoided something like £15,000 in unnecessary expenditures and next year I would expect to make similar savings on top of the expected returns.  If we were to do the work that Sysload does manually it would take us 100 man-hours a week.  With Sysload in the background we should reduce this to about 20."

“Based on the original business case over 5 years, the council will invest £293K to avoid staff costs in the order of £615K, with the expectation that after three years we will be in a positive balance. Most councils do not have active systems in place but to provide the high quality service required by the council’s service departments and meet public expectations, York has decided that investing in Sysload is cost-effective.  Before installing system monitoring we were running blindfold - Sysload is our lookout tower, it is our eyes.”