Help, My System’s Not Breathing!
A company of over 3000 employees was suffering from repeating slowness of its IT systems during work hours. The company’s IT team tried hard to find the root of the problem, but despite their best efforts, the system seemed to be collapsing.
External IT professionals were called to help. The IT hardware was replaced (boy, was that a sore point!) but nothing worked. A bottleneck load was happening somewhere in the branched system but nobody could seem to find the problem.
Fortunately, we’d met with the company’s IT team a few weeks earlier at a convention, and we’d introduced the AimBetter system to them. When there was little hope in site, they called us to ask for help. The POC gave quick answers: apparently, the virtual system that was being used by the company was performing overall backups during the day, including the databases.
IO was massively slowing the system, impatient users made the IO center crash.
We immediately turned off the daytime backups and performed a forced shutdown to the server, and the company quickly went back to normal activity. And we gained a new client.
Daily Sluggishness that Can’t be Helped with Coffee
A large holding company was dealing with bad system performance. Users were complaining about slow performance with every batch of files. Using AimBetter system, the team detected the cause of the slowdown- the internet card was defined as 100MB though it was actually 1GB. This setting was made automatically due to a problem with the switch of the virtual system. A small change of the parameter on the card ended the problem, prevented much larger and longer problems, and created happier, more efficient workers.
Daily Crashes with No Explanation? AimBetter to the Rescue!
We were recently contacted to help a large international company pinpoint the source of their daily system crashes. AimBetter was able to identify the problem: one of the processes was writing a very large file to disk, but the process failed because there was not enough disk space. During this crash the process was stopping other applications and causing mayhem. Every time the IT team checked the server it looked ok, but AimBetter dug deeper and saw that the lack of disk space was the cause of the chaos.
Big Brother is Watching
The following is an excerpt from a real conversation:
Representative: Good afternoon Yaffa, why are you running barcode printing during the day?
Yaffa: How do you know? Are you spying on me?
Representative: Only if I see a problem. David from purchasing and Yossi from finance have been having computer slowdowns for several minutes, and we’ve been able to connect it to the barcode printing.
Yaffa: Oh sorry, I didn’t know… I’m leaving early today… and this will not repeat, thank you.
Representative: No problem, Have a nice day, just please stop the running program, so everyone can get back to work.
Many people who experience system slowness can identify with this story…but it doesn’t have to be that way. With system alerts in real time about every activity in the server level and the entire company level so that you can see everything you need with one glance.
AimBetter can track each computer’s performance and can monitor each application at any time chosen to pinpoint the exact cause of slowness or locks. Once the problem is found, all that’s left is to do copy-paste to the Support/IT team and they can resolve the problem quickly.
When WINDOWS Updates Cause Downtime
A customer complained that every few days the server went into a tailspin during the workday at random hours, and was ‘choking’ such that they couldn’t connect to the server – the only option was to reboot. The server was managed by a well-known IT company that takes a retainer from its clients but fails to provide sufficient services when the going gets rough.
I heard that the company needed help, and I found a surprising cause for the outages: the automatic WINDOWS updates had a bug patch that was crashing the server. There would be no way to identify this problem from the Task Manager – it required constant surveillance of all processes simultaneously to find the glitch.
And so, I can confidently state, there are cases where it isn’t wise to allow a WINDOWS update…but you may not know that until it’s too late…
The (Dreaded) Call that Every IT Team Member Gets Weekly
What do you do when your screen is showing an error? Close all applications and opening them again – even if it means halting a program that’s been running for 15 hours?
It’s not pleasant, but there is a solution – we see every error listed in the system log of SQL that tried and failed.
– Conversion, dividing by 0, and corrupted coding
– From which user’s computer, which database server, which programs were running and what crashed.
From this information all that’s left is to copy/paste into an email and map out the path towards a solution.