EASI accelerates troubleshooting and paves the way for seamless cloud migrations with Skylight

At EASI, Skylight is used to monitor customers accessing their cloud hosting, providing the team with visibility into the performance of what’s (and how things are) running inside their cloud. This data is accessible for troubleshooting, managing migrations, and providing monitoring KPIs.

Why did you choose Accedian Skylight?

The EASI team originally discovered Accedian at one of their customers, a major healthcare organization based in Brussels, who uses Accedian Skylight to resolve issues and optimize their end-to-end performance.

Our [EASI] team had also tested alternative tools and solutions on the market, but we had not been successful at tracking down the fault on the server/application sides. When the project got launched, we decided to test Skylight and found all the information we needed during the first day.

EASI is offering strict SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to its customers which requires our [EASI] team to continuously look for ways to improve our quality of service, proactiveness and response times. We felt a solution like Accedian’s could help us increase our team’s effectiveness in both of the following:

• Monitoring the hosting operations of customer systems inside of our data center: in this case, our expectation was to be able to immediately identify the origin of the problem (our infrastructure, or the customer’s application and network link to our data center)
• Monitoring our Software-as-a-Service platform (where we are in charge of 100% of the delivery and SLAs are even tighter)

When we were evaluating new solutions, we were facing a long-lasting, intermittent slowness for one customer using one of our SaaS applications, where it had so far been impossible to locate the origin of the problem (network, data center infrastructure or application). After 6 weeks of unsuccessful investigations with our classical monitoring and troubleshooting tools (SNMP, logs, Wireshark for trace analysis), we installed Accedian for a test. After just a few hours, we had installed the solution and already figured out what the root cause was.

How do you use it?

For EASI’s SaaS Platform

For our own systems, Skylight is used by different teams:

• Our system engineering team implemented and managed the Skylight solution – they are leading any troubleshooting or analysis related to our network and cloud infrastructure
• Our development team also undertakes some analysis directly on Skylight’s interface to feed their optimization efforts and pinpoints the transactions that require their attention and could be refactored

Skylight is used in pre- and post-release stages for many SaaS applications to:

• Baseline the response times, volume and activity of the applications
• Evaluate the impact of any change made to the application (run in DevOps mode)
• Pinpoint any bottleneck or error occurring in production

Results and ROI

For EASI, Accedian is more than just a software provider, they act like a partner and we love their transparent and pragmatic approach as well as their focus on making the growth EASI’s business easy.

They provide us with a platform that integrates software that is easy to implement, absolutely non-intrusive, scalable and suitable for cloud environments. They also focus on training and supporting our team so that we are able to deliver high standard services to our customers.

How do you plan on using it in the future?

Skylight is not only available as a solution, but also as an on-demand platform for IT Service Providers. Based on our positive experience, we are building a flexible service offering which can be deployed on-premises to help our customers accelerate troubleshooting, assess their IT network and cloud infrastructure and prepare for their migration to the cloud.
We strongly believe that this high value service will ease the transition of many end users from classical data center operations to EASI’s cloud!