March 27, 2006 (Computerworld) With more consumers monitoring their credit records online to fight fraud and protect themselves from identity theft, online credit-monitoring service TrueCredit has decided to ramp up its Web infrastructure to keep pace with demand.
One of the biggest problems, according to Scott Metzger, chief technology officer at TrueCredit, was that the company could see the top 25 user queries of its existing Oracle 9i databases for its Web site but could not determine which applications were most affected by the queries. That meant loads couldn’t accurately be monitored, balanced or modified to keep the TrueCredit site running smoothly as customer demands grew, he said.
To bolster its operations, TrueCredit is rolling out CoreFirst, transaction workload management software from New York-based OpTier Inc. The application allows TrueCredit to modify workloads on the fly and add other key features, including prioritization for tasks, to get the most out of the infrastructure it has in-house.
For San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based TrueCredit, a wholly owned subsidiary of credit information vendor TransUnion LLC, the extra information from CoreFirst has helped streamline its infrastructure and make it more responsive for online customers, Metzger said.
“Now we can define a transaction and have it related to any application,” Metzger said. “Those are things we can see with OpTier that we couldn’t see previously.” If systems administrators see database loads increase by 30% over the previous day’s operations, they can now see which application is putting that extra load on the database, which is a huge gain, he said. CoreFirst allows technicians to set performance monitors and notifications for various service levels so that adjustments can be made as needed to keep the site operating efficiently, he said.
CoreFirst also puts prioritization hooks into the databases, allowing IT workers to tell the application which tasks should get priority. “They’re able to allow us to define what application has priority over other applications” without having to buy more hardware and software, Metzger said. “That’s our motivation on the prioritization features.”
A proof-of-concept project was completed late last year, with a full deployment of CoreFirst expected by June, Metzger said. TrueCredit officials declined to discuss how much the rollout will cost.
The TrueCredit Web site gets about 500,000 unique visits daily, and the applications that run it see a peak of about 50,000 concurrent users each day. About 12 million online customers have been served since the credit-monitoring services were first offered in 1999.
TrueCredit chose OpTier over other vendors because of the prioritization features offered, Metzger said. The online credit-monitoring company also needed a system that could work with both of the code bases used for its Web infrastructure. (The company developed its own service-oriented architecture stack in 2000 and then decided to migrate to BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic in 2003.)
“What was impressive with OpTier was in our legacy servers, we built our own messaging stack and services module, and within a few weeks they were able to successfully adapt to it in the short term,” Metzger said.
CoreFirst allows users to control resource allocation at the cross-tier transaction level, based on business prioritization policies, according to OpTier. The software automatically discovers, tracks and profiles every transaction, using a contextual technology that is transparently placed on top of tier systems.
Analyst Jean Pierre Garbani at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. said OpTier’s ability to show transaction activity and allow users to prioritize them is an important plus. “This is the kind of thing you could find in mainframes previously, but not in distributed computing,” Garbani said.
Dennis Drogseth, an analyst at Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise Management Associates, called CoreFirst’s capabilities “very useful” for users. “They’re transaction-centric,” he said. “That’s the best baseline for understanding the quality of user experience. And they have active optimization, which is distinctive.”
OpTier also is very good at providing information on “service accounting,” or how much of a service is being used and who is using it, Drogseth said. “That’s a very valuable combination," he added. "I see a lot of growth in the marketplace. I don’t know of any vendor of any size combining all three.”