Atos Worldline Analyzes End-to-End Application Performance with ACE™ Analyst
Rudy Van Rompaey
Senior Telecom System
Engineer
Atos Worldline, an Atos Origin company, is a European leader in the processing of high volume electronic transactions, specializing in electronic payment services, card processing, client relation management, and e-services. They provide powerful technological solutions to create value throughout the chain. Atos Worldline has 4,200 employees Europe-wide, and 630 Million Euros of revenue in 2006.
At Atos Worldline SA/NV, located in Belgium, networks serve both internal and external applications, including ERP platforms, customer call centres, R&D integration laboratories, electronic financial transactions for merchants, e-commerce applications, and file transfers with banks and third parties. These highly critical applications are generally multi-tiered, redundant, and geographically spread. In 2006, Atos Worldline SA/NV handled over 1 billion debit and credit card transactions over their network.
Since modern data networks and applications are complex, comprising multiple components, monitoring traffic from a single location does not reveal the complete end-to-end picture that is required for effective application performance management. To troubleshoot and understand these applications, Atos Worldline SA/NV recognized they needed to perform the following:
- Understand complex multi-tiered application traffic
- Analyze application response time delay
- Pinpoint and remedy the cause of application performance problems
Atos Worldline SA/NV performed a marketplace comparison, followed by a proof-of-concept in its highly complex e-commerce environment, and concluded that OPNET’s ACE™ Analyst was the right product to meet its needs. Over time, multiple departments became convinced of its added value, and the solution is now used by various IT services throughout the organization.
Atos instrumented their environment by installing ACE™ Analyst agents on dedicated servers connected to mirror ports on central switches. This enables flexible application capture no matter where problems in the network occur.
“In our experience ACE™ Analyst is an efficient diagnostic tool that helps to understand application behaviour, application flows between tiers, protocol congestion, and origins and components of delay.
“Thanks to ACE™ Analyst, performance problems can be quickly diagnosed, and automated ACE™ Analyst reports enable immediate and efficient corrective actions.”
Rudy Van Rompaey
Senior Telecom System Engineer
Networking Department, Atos Worldline