Increased network visibility has been one of the chief benefits for the B.C. Government after they rolled out new AppCritical software.
Since the deployment, more than a year ago, network troubleshooting has been reduced by 75 per cent, according to Martin Webb, manager, data network operations, Government of BC.
The catalyst for moving to the new package was a response to what they were continually experiencing -- a lot of issues that were "undefined", said Webb.
"For example, a client calling in saying that they're experiencing a slow response on a particular application," said Webb. "What we're trying to do is pinpoint where the issues are."
He added that they needed some type of visibility to allow for greater insight into the performance of the network.
"What we were trying to do was move to a better understanding of the quality of experience for the end user," he said.
Vancouver-based Apparent Networks deployed the software and also implemented AppCritical for Collier County in Florida, according to Chris Norris, product manager, Apparent Networks.
"One of the strong points for what AppCritical provides the British Columbia government is its relatively low deployment footprint," said Norris.
British Columbia's also somewhat unique in that it has a very geographically diverse government base, and there are weather conditions which separate or sever network links in the winter, he said.
"Parts of the province actually get disconnected and if your management system isn't resilient to that type of hard failure, then you're in really big trouble," said Norris. "Because of the limited deployment requirements, they needed the ability to quickly implement a large multi vendor, multi administrative network that works very well for government."
AppCritical's ability to provide constant network testing gives them a much more refined look into the network and how it's performing, said Webb.B
"One of the things we've been able to do since using AppCritical is anywhere we have some hotspots in the network where we had issues, we've been able to turn on those parts of the network and look at performance," he said.
B.C. has approximately 40,000 government users and the feedback has been positive, according to Webb.
"We're able to improve our level of service that we're providing to them, bring things to their attention and work through them before they actually start affecting their applications," he said.
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