Hastings Mutual Improves Application Performance with Black Box Technology

New York - In an effort to improve the quality, availability and performance of its Web-based Policy Express policy issuance system, Hastings Mutual Insurance, a regional insurance company serving the Midwest, has deployed AppSight Application Problem Resolution System from Identify Software. Policy Express is a vital business application that is accessed by nearly 850 Hastings agents each day as they quote and write customers' policies. Ninety percent of all new homeowners and personal automobile policies that Hastings issues are processed though Policy Express."We were initially looking for a performance management solution to improve our service levels by detecting application performance problems before they become a productivity issue for our agent community," says Bob Eshelbrenner, CIO of Hastings Mutual Insurance. "With AppSight, we can not only identify our applications' performance problems faster, we also gain the visibility to rapidly determine the root cause, leading to a much faster resolution, which is the end-game after all."

Identify claims that the AppSight Application Problem Resolution System has been proved to eliminate up to 80% of the cycle time traditionally consumed by root cause analysis. AppSight leverages patented black box software to monitor actual application execution (in production, as well as in development and QA) and automatically detect faults and performance issues in .NET, Windows, and J2EE applications. When a problem is detected, AppSight captures a synchronized, real-time log of user actions, system events, performance metrics, configuration data, and code execution flow - much like the "black box" flight recorder on an aircraft captures a real-time record of a flight. The captured information can be analyzed by the entire problem resolution team, using role-specific views, to rapidly pinpoint the root cause of performance, configuration, application code, or user errors.