Customer Success Story - Retail Industry

Excerpt from Managing .NET, J2EE apps
by Colleen Frye, ADPmag.com

At a major Midwestern retailer, a problem with a guest services application running at its stores led the company to Xtremesoft. The customer-facing application, used by in-store service desk personnel, would run fine for four to six hours, then hang up, according to the manager of the e-technologies group. "We suspected it was a memory leak, but it was hard to nail down," he said. After evaluating two products to help track down the problem, the firm chose Xtremesoft's AppMetrics for Transactions for the COM+ application server.

"We initially installed AppMetrics in a lab environment and did testing of the application," explained the manager. "We noticed a peculiar behavior immediately. This led to the discovery and fixing of a system-level memory leak. Once we were past that problem, we ran AppMetrics in the production environment and identified a COM+ component in the application that needed to be fixed as well."

Since resolving that issue, the retailer continues to use AppMetrics in the lab, monitoring applications during the testing phase. "The idea is to catch things before they go out," noted the manager.

The manager said Web services are not under consideration for internal applications at this point, but are on the table for partner-to-partner applications. He said Xtremesoft would have a role there as well, "when we're doing construction of those applications and they get closer to the testing phase. We will use it as a monitoring tool in the testing cycle."