“AimBetter has several edges, one of which is that you don’t have to be a DBA to solve problems.”
Maintaining our databases in top shape is of primary concern
Diplomat is a global distribution company representing leading brands such as P&G, Duracell, Wella, Braun, Nestle, Kellogg’s, Heinz and more. With the capability to reach online customers and 60,000 direct distribution points extending four continents with advanced logistics centers and thousands of daily orders, we don’t have the privilege to have our databases down or underperforming.
Since 2008, Diplomat has been using Microsoft’s System Center Operation Management (SCOM) to monitor our Wintel servers. We chose SCOM because most of our operations are based on Microsoft, including our SQL databases. For servers that SCOM did not support, we used various monitoring software, all of which sent data directly to SCOM for analysis.
Why we switched to AimBetter
We made wide use of monitoring services but the general feeling was that we weren’t getting enough in return. SCOM lacked the intelligence to preempt problems or even catch them in time. We weren’t getting much more than status reports and system error alerts, so we decided to explore other options. We chose AimBetter only after thoroughly testing BMC, IBM, and HP. But none of these solutions answered all our needs and at times required excessive human resources to achieve the desired outcome.
We chose AimBetter for several reasons:
- It shortened the time it took to fix problems
- It had fantastic capability to analyze events
- No DBA was required to handle most problems
- After using AimBetter for over a year, I have discovered some additional advantages AimBetter possesses over other contenders:
- It accurately points out problems based on changes in behavior in the system being monitored
- It knows how to recognize errors in code under development, which expedites the QA stage
- It shows superior ability in real-time monitoring and reporting
- It helps analyze the impact on the system under different levels of resource consumption
- It precisely points at the source of the threat, at times after a single query
- It identifies the problematic event with a detailed execution plan
- It provides the tools to quickly resolve the problem
As I pointed out, in most case it took no more than an IT person to quickly resolve the emerging problem, which helps tremendously in reducing the workload on the Database Administrator (DBA). Overall, AimBetter helps our systems be more responsive and our organization to better comply with our demanding SLA standards.
