J.C. Penney seeks better grip on SLAs

Computerworld - Retailer J.C. Penney Co., which uses application performance monitoring software developed by NetQoS Inc., plans to upgrade to a new version to help ensure that it complies with IT service-level agreements (SLA) nationwide.
J.C. Penney plans to install SuperAgent Version 5 from Austin-based NetQoS in April, after having used prior releases for nearly two years, said Barry Hicks, head of performance management at the Plano, Texas-based department store chain.
SLAs are becoming "strategically important" to the company as it tries to understand what levels of performance end users will experience on various applications, Hicks said.
"Today, we can only approximate," he explained. "Having a verifiable user response time is something we consider to be mission-critical to our operations as we move more and more to client/server and Web-based applications."
J.C. Penney currently runs SuperAgent Version 4 on 20 hardware appliances and uses the software to measure the performance of all applications at more than 1,000 department stores and nearly 2,800 drugstores operated by its Eckerd Corp. unit. The NetQoS tools also monitor the corporate and Eckerd Web sites, said Ginger Elliott, manager of network technologies at J.C. Penney.
The company picked SuperAgent two years ago because the technology didn't require it to install client software on tens of thousands of desktop PCs and other end-user devices, Elliott said. "Frankly, a lot of our users are not very skilled at loading applications," she said. "We were running into performance issues on the client side, but the only tool we could use was multiple sniffers."
There are about 80 management software vendors that sell SLA measurement tools, said Rick Sturm, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. The major vendors include Computer Associates International Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM's Tivoli unit.
But Sturm said one differentiator for SuperAgent Version 5 is that it gives network managers "actionable information," meaning that if performance on an application was to slow down, an IT manager could identify the precise port on a switch or server that is causing the problem.
Setting Expectations

Ginger Elliott, manager of network technologies at J.C. Penney Co.