Prometric Deploys OPNET Panorama™ to Improve Application Performance
Prometric is the recognized global leader in technology-enabled testing and assessment services. In fact, they invented the industry. Headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, Prometric offers test design, test delivery, and data management services to clients around the world. In 2008, they delivered more than nine million exams through a network of over 10,000 testing locations in more than 160 countries.
Prometric’s scheduling and registration application is a business-critical web-based application used by testing centers and test-takers to schedule exam appointments and to upload test results. For example, a user wishing to take a Microsoft certification exam would use this application when visiting the Prometric website to schedule the time, date and location to take their test. On any given day, thousands of users worldwide access the Prometric website to schedule and register for a diverse array of computer-based exams of organizations operating in almost any market space, including academic, corporate, government, professional associations, healthcare, or IT certification and testing.
Prometric purchased OPNET Panorama to further improve customer satisfaction with regard to registration and results processes by obtaining a deeper understanding of application performance issues when they arose.
Measurable ROI at Prometric
Within eight weeks of deploying Panorama, the support team at Prometric had already made eight to ten minor configuration changes that significantly improved application performance – without changing the application logic or architecture. Prometric customer satisfaction scores with regard to registration and results processing have measurably improved and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
Mike Murphy, Manager, Data Center Infrastructure and Enterprise Monitoring at Prometric relates “Panorama was relatively straightforward to setup; it only took about two or three days. It was already helping solve application problems by the end of the first week in deployment.”
OPNET Panorama's Correlation Technology and Capture Rates Make the Difference
Using Panorama’s per second sampling in conjunction with its analytical reporting features, Mike Murphy’s data center team at Prometric quickly identified specific bottlenecks in the application stack.
“Panorama gives us a comprehensive application performance toolkit – with all the usual features such as the tracing and memory analysis, as well as unique features such as metrics correlation, that we can leverage to solve different kinds of problems. Panorama allows us to attack the problem from multiple perspectives: in the code, the database, and the overall application system.”
“We really like Panorama’s detailed monitoring and reporting, including the graphical histogram views that report on one-second data. Our other monitoring tools were ‘averaging out’ key pieces of information that Panorama was able to give us. We are confident that the visibility Panorama gives us into application performance is crucial to the health of our overall bottom line.”
Mike Murphy
Manager, Data Center Infrastructure
Prometric