Precisely how do you analyse the cause of a fault with your SaaS products and find out whether it’s something you can fix?

A Story from Microsoft

Recently a number of Office 365 customers found their Exchange Online service was experiencing disruption.

Microsoft later explained this as an interruption caused by a dependent third party network.

At AP we represent a great US company called Exoprise whose sophisticated monitoring system, CloudReady gives immediate warning of developing problems with all types of cloud based infrastructure.

CloudReady customers had response time alarms configured for their sensors. This meant that they were notified via text message, email or through their helpdesk tools which contained a link to the CloudReady portal.

We have analysed CloudReady’s reporting of this issue and not only did it report the problem with Exchange Online long before any announcement from Microsoft but Exoprise customers could also be sure that they knew the true source of the problem (CloudReady crowd data showed that other Exchange Online customers were all experiencing the same problems).

Local Problems, Local Solutions

On the other hand, if the cause had been rooted in an individual customer’s infrastructure, CloudReady would have reported this too.

Common causes of failures in performance are:

• Identified mis-configured internal DNS servers (routing traffic the wrong way out their network)
• ISP routing issues (this happens more often you think and introduces latencies that manifest as sporadic connectivity issues)
• SSO issues (latencies – or very long SAML authentication times)
• Proxies
• MPLS issues
• Bad ISP network nodes

Either way, each and every CloudReady customer was better informed than those without CloudReady performance management.

If you’d like to hear more about this very responsive solution to SaaS performance management and exactly how CloudReady manages this type of incident, please contact us for a trial.