OC Systems' RTI Software Delivers Production Response Time Measurements

U.S. Government Agency Purchases 25,000 Licenses of RTI for ITCAM to Monitor End-User Login Experience

Fairfax, VA (June 10, 2009) —OC Systems, Inc. announced today that one of the largest agencies in the U.S. federal government has purchased 25,000 seats of RootCause Transaction Instrumentation (RTI) for ITCAM to proactively alert its operations staff about slowdowns in a critical IT system.

RTI measures the actual end user experience for transactions that begin in a web browser. For this particular agency, it captures data about the performance of the agency's thick-client Java-based portal. In real time, it monitors the length of time it takes end users to perform transactions using the portal, starting with the first "click" and ending with the "render" (when the result is returned on the web page).

"Many organizations estimate this information using synthetic transactions or other approximations," said Oliver Cole, president and CEO of OC Systems. "But it is not unusual for those estimates to show that everything is working well while end users are calling in to complain of slow response times."

"This agency has higher standards," Cole explained. "It was important to them to monitor the current login experience in real time for actual users around the country. RTI lets them do that."

RTI for ITCAM integrates with IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) for Response Time Tracking (RTT) using the Application Response Measurement (ARM) standard. This allows the agency to deconstruct transaction response times and perform root-cause analysis to determine the source of the slowness.

Combining RTI with IBM's ITCAM RTT, the agency can:

• Capture response times of actual transactions, as opposed to using synthetic transactions that don't represent what people are really doing.
• Identify response times by region of the country and quickly determine whether an incident is local or a nation-wide data center issue.
• Trace a transaction from front to back, and quickly identify the subsystem that is causing a problem.
•  Monitor transactions in real time and alert operations staff when system behavior exceeds normal processing.

"Given the heavy demands that can be made on this system and its critical nature, they considered it absolutely essential to detect and resolve system slowdowns as quickly as possible," stated Cole. "By extending ITCAM RTT's transaction tracing all the way to the browser, RTI lets the agency obtain the most complete, real-world picture of what end users are experiencing and proactively act to improve system performance when necessary. The goal is to give operations staff enough advance warning so they can resolve issues before end users even notice there is a problem."

RTI for ITCAM is one in a series of monitoring products from OC Systems that offer response time tracking for web-based (SaaS) applications. The RTI products have been designed to be simple to install and easy to use. They support developers, testers and operations in delivering and managing applications that require high levels of reliability and availability.

About OC Systems
OC Systems, Inc. provides state-of-the-art software tools, development environments, and services that its customers use to improve the performance and operational reliability of their software applications. Customers include Lockheed Martin, IBM, Northrop Grumman, SAS, Intel, SAIC and the U.S. Army. Founded in 1983, the employee-owned company is based in Fairfax, Virginia. More information may be obtained at www.ocsystems.com.