University of Nottingham pilots cloud troubleshooting solution

University pilots Visual Network Systems solution after successful implementation of its flagship product

The University of Nottingham is piloting a tool designed to help businesses and service providers pinpoint performance issues on remotely hosted cloud applications.

The university said that it is keen to trial OmniPoint, a cloud app troubleshooting solution from Visual Network Systems, after the successful implementation of the firm's Visual Performance Manager.

Simon Miller, network management officer at the University of Nottingham, said that the university is trialling the solution after being impressed by Visual Performance Manager.

"Before we began using Visual Performance Manager, network and application performance problems were logged by users after problems occurred," he said

"We had no historical records to examine the problems that our users had been experiencing, so we had to make decisions based on the ad hoc reports.

"In addition, some people did not complain until a long time after experiencing problems, which again made it difficult to find the root cause."

Miller explained that, in order to make it easier to identify issues, the university piloted some of the performance management solutions on the market two years ago and set tough evaluation criteria.

"During the pilot with Visual Network Systems, we identified a significant problem that would have really affected the university's revenues. The problem affected our finance department, which was generating invoices for the Student Loans Company a couple of times a year," he said.

"It's important that the invoicing process runs smoothly. Otherwise, it affects the university's profitability. Normally, fixing a problem like that would take several days, but Visual Performance Manager took just a couple of hours during the pilot.

"The solution really proved its mettle during that time: the pilot helped us put a business case together to make a bid for a larger deployment."

Miller added that he hopes for a similar outcome from the university's pilot of the OmniPoint solution.