Customer Story
City of Geel Dramatically Improves Application and Network Performance with ExtraHop
Geel is a Belgian city in the province of Antwerp that is home to 40,000 citizens.
The CHALLENGE
Securing a complex combination of use cases, locations, and legacy equipment with a small IT team.
In the past, assumptions led to a lot of unnecessary changes, costly upgrades, and also the risk of creating new problems. With ExtraHop, we can now determine the root cause of problems twice as fast as before and with more certainty.
Rob Lenaerts Computer Scientist, City of Geel
The Technology Environment
- Critical administrative applications, including financial accounting, enterprise resource planning, supply chain, and health and safety applications
- A mixture of on-premises and cloud platforms
- "We are tasked with managing a diverse array of critical applications running on disparate hardware systems and now in the cloud as well," explains Rob Lenaerts, Computer Scientist for the City of Geel.
- "Most of the departments are connected to our metropolitan area network (MAN) with fiber and other minor locations connect with less-performant uplinks. Applications and storage run on a virtualized environment across a pair of redundant data centers," says Lenaerts.
WHY REVEALX
Why the City of Geel Chose RevealX
Easy to implement and user friendly
- "When we tested RevealX it had a lot of standard metrics 'in the box' that we could just turn on, keeping configuration to a minimum," says Lenaerts.
Full stream reassembly and full content analysis of wire data traversing the network
- "For us, alongside troubleshooting, it is the delivery of acceptable application performance and minimal login times that are the main targets in improving performance issues," says Lenaerts. "With some incidents you know where to look but if this isn't clear we look at RevealX first."
Non-disruptive, RevealX required only a network tap at one data center
The Outcome
First-Hand Intelligence Enables Better Performance
Simplified application troubleshooting
- "We now have first-hand intelligence of the health of our applications that we can bring to the attention of our suppliers to get problems solved faster," says Lenaerts.
Quick resolution to network performance issues
- Determined root cause of unacceptably slow logins to virtual desktops was due to a combination of a centralized client on an application server, the antivirus scanner, and a router configuration. "We provided the workaround and the [virtual desktop infrastructure] project could continue as planned without the slowdowns," Lenaerts adds.
Continual monitoring of critical services enables smooth version upgrades, application migrations, and new application rollouts
Is RevealX right for you?
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