CITTIO WatchTower Gives PacSun a Leg Up on Server Monitoring

Published: March 14, 2006

by Alex Woodie

One of the challenges of running a lean IT shop is being able to gather and process information quickly enough to be pro-active about problems like server outages, as opposed to playing catch-up from a reactive stance. This was a challenge faced by clothing retailer Pacific Sunwear, which runs applications on OS/400, Windows, and Solaris servers, and which strives to run a lean IT shop. When it came to monitoring troublesome Wintel servers, Pacific Sunwear turned to WatchTower version 2.5, a system monitoring tool announced by CITTIO last week.

WatchTower is a heterogeneous system monitoring system that uses IP pipes and simple network management protocol (SNMP) to monitor the performance of applications, servers, and network devices. The product has several uses, including keeping statistics relevant to service level agreements (SLAs), and also for helping computer operators and IT administrators be pro-active about outages, instead of waiting for users to sound the alarm.

This was the problem faced by Pacific Sunwear, the Anaheim, California, company that operates more than 900 retail clothing outlets across North America. While Pacific Sunwear runs it's most critical applications--including Island Pacific's merchandise management system, Manhattan Associates' warehouse management software, and IBM WebSphere Commerce Server--on a pair of iSeries Model 840s (soon to be i5 Model 570s) mirrored using Lakeview Technology's high availability software, the company's slim IT staff (it numbers about 90 total) is also responsible for the care and upkeep of about 55 Wintel and a smaller number of Sun Microsystems Solaris boxes that serve as file and print servers, and which also fill tactical needs for point solutions.

Pacific Sunwear employs human operators to monitor the strategic iSeries servers on a 24/7 basis, but it doesn't have the manpower dedicated to monitoring the server farm, says Ron Anderson director of technical services at Pacific Sunwear. "We were less concerned about the iSeries, and more concerned about supplemental Wintel and Sun boxes," Anderson says. "We didn't have good visibility into those other systems we had there [along with the iSeries]."

The company decided to automate its monitoring, and first looked at tier-one systems management products, including IBM's Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView suites. However, Anderson found these solutions too complex for Pacific Sunwear's needs. These solutions also used an agent approach to monitoring systems, which Anderson says has been known to affect the performance of the application they're supposed to be helping.

Then the company found an agent-less monitoring system in WatchTower, a Linux-based application developed by San Francisco-based CITTIO. Pacific Sunwear decided the software was a good fit in several respects, including basic functionality (hardware heartbeat monitoring function and graphical displays) and price (it costs only $200 to $400 per node), so it bought the software and had it up and running within two weeks.

Today, WatchTower's graphical dashboard interface gives Pacific Sunwear's six operators and 12 network managers the capability to see whether their Wintel and Solaris boxes are up (signified with a green light) or down (signified with a red light) with a quick glance when they take over one of two shifts. "If those services are not available at 6 a.m., there is lost productivity to the business," Anderson says. "We're able to hit that first to make sure that we have continuous availability." The company also uses WatchTower for heartbeat monitoring of its iSeries servers.

If a user calls up the Pacific Sunwear help desk because their Windows or Solaris particular application isn't working, then the IT department has failed to properly do its job, says Ron Ehlers, vice president of information services at Pacific Sunwear. With WatchTower, "we see it before the user calls us. Whatever the issue is, it's transparent to the user and they're not aware of problems. . . Anything less than that is disappointing."

Pacific Sunwear is using WatchTower version 2.5, which CITTIO launched last week, and which won't be generally available until next quarter. The retailer has found some of the new features in version 2.5 to be quite useful. Among these are the new agent-less discovery process that lists equipment and corresponding IP addresses within hours of deployment; a new multipurpose poller that tests application performance no matter what language the application was developed in; and new SLA graphics added to its dashboard interface. WatchTower 2.5 also gives administrators and operators quick access to more than 3,300 technical resources via integration with Safari Books Online.

The new features in version 2.5 mesh with Pacific Sunwear's business and technology direction," Ehlers says. "The support for new platforms, as well as being able to get usable, real-time information through the function-specific dashboards will be critical to synchronizing our IT operations with business initiatives," he says. "Furthermore, the integration with Safari Books really demonstrates CITTIO's unique vision."

Ironically, Pacific Sunwear is not yet using the new OS/400 functionality that CITTIO will deliver with version 2.5. With this release, the company has added the capability to import real-time and historic performance graphs directly from OS/400, in addition to network devices from Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper.

For more information about WatchTower, visit www.cittio.com.