Great Customer Service is Knowing What is NOT the Problem

Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati

Euclid Insurance, located in Itasca, Illinois, knows how important customer service is when growing a business. For almost 60 years, Euclid has been providing brokerage services, employee benefits, retirement programs and property and casualty insurance coverage for companies of all sizes across the U.S. and can attribute customer service to much of their longevity and success. Dan Novak, the IT Manager for Euclid, has his own set of customers to keep happy—the 140 Euclid employees that depend on his virtual and physical network.

Dan’s infrastructure currently includes three ESX 4.1 servers hosting VMware View 4.6. He has 65 virtual desktops that he supports and after implementing the VDI solution he started to see some performance issues for various users at various times. Due to the nature of a virtualized environment, performance problems can have a ripple effect on other elements in the infrastructure that can appear and forever disappear in a matter of moments. Finding a monitoring solution that could see metrics for all of the objects across his infrastructure in real time is what led him to trial the Xangati VDI Dashboard.

“I knew that there were multiple factors that can affect a user’s performance and in order to find the root cause we needed to be able to monitor all of the possible factors,” said Dan. “The biggest benefit of Xangati was how the VDI Dashboard showed me what items were not causing an issue.”

With Xangati, Dan was able to eliminate the finger pointing between networking and storage by determining that one user’s performance problem was in fact CPU utilization. Dan used Xangati to record high-CPU events and correlate those with user performance issues. At the same time he was able to see other system metrics during the performance event which helped further confirm CPU utilization as the true source of the performance problem and its ripple effect.

By quickly eliminating which elements are not causing the performance problems across the infrastructure, Dan is able to provide superior support for his Euclid employees and keep them productive. After all, like Euclid Insurance, Dan puts a premium on customer service.

“I attempted to use other management software but lack of support prevented us from moving forward with those vendors, said Dan. “Support is one area where Xangati really shines.”