Sapporo City Hall Uses Stratusphere UX to Fix Login Problems for Users
The Sapporo City Hall provides many services to the residents of Sapporo, Japan, which is the largest city north of Tokyo and the fifth largest in Japan. Sapporo City Hall IT Team had established an Internet separation environment that met the guidelines of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. They operated a work system in an environment where work terminals are isolated from the Internet. Internet access at work terminals is provided by a virtual browser in a server-based computing (SBC) environment. There are about 15,000 employees (full-time and fiscal year appointments, etc.), but due to the recent increase in the number of users with simultaneous access, it took significantly more time to launch a virtual browser. As the number of concurrent connections increased, the virtual browser's performance degraded. This led to a decline in operational efficiency and overall user experience. Traditional monitoring tools used by the Team were limited to investigating server-related load issues but was not able to provide any in-depth diagnostics data. The current tools were also subject to operational challenges due to frequent vendor support. As a result, the IT Team was unable to fully utilize the functions of the current tools, leaving them without the visibility and data required to manage the virtual environment.
The IT Team then launched a migration project with the following key goals:
- Addressing performance challenges for Internet browsing Environments.
- Overcoming the limitations of current tools to identify the root causes of problems with system
- Working to improve the user experience in the overall environment for 15,000 employees.
- Improving monitoring and log analysis capabilities.
- Overcoming limitations in current tool utilization due to usability challenges.
A partner recommended Liquidware Stratusphere UX to the Sapporo City Hall IT Team. Stratusphere UX was rapidly deployed in a virtual environment, without the need to prepare for a formal internal verification and approval process. As a result of deploying Stratusphere UX, the IT Team was finally able to get the level of detailed data required and perform an in-depth investigation of access logs and monitoring activities. Detailed access logs, log information collection and monitoring data enabled a comprehensive view into and investigation of system behavior and resource contention. Detailed analysis identified system bottle necks and point of slowness. The IT Team was then able to understand and address the causes of these issues. The solution made it possible to understand detailed situations and enabled performance evaluation including network, hardware, applications, and quality of each user’s experience as well as server platforms. The solution provided deep insight into system slowness with regard to the logon storm caused by the increased number of users at specific times of day.
Stratusphere UX provided the capability to easily see which users and which processes may affect login delays, and which applications running within the user are causing resource pressure. By identifying factors related to login delays or application startup delays, managers can now take improvement measures and accumulate knowledge about the virtual environment. In addition, all Stratusphere UX components are provided by the virtual appliance, making it simple to deploy and easy to understand the (license) cost structure. A virtual appliance that can be deployed on a virtualization platform is provided, the test environment is unnecessary and internal verification and related approval period can be shortened or eliminated. There is no need to build a separate database server such as Oracle or SQL. In addition, the agents consume virtually no system resource, so the load on the virtual base is very low. The billing system is easy to understand, there is no add-on license, and all functions can be used with user-specific cost structure. All of these advantages were important considerations for the Sapporo City Hall organization.
