Telecommunication Company’s P4 Issues Resolved at a P1 Pace

A critical error in the company's testing environment was solved with the pace of a priority 1 ticket.

CUSTOMER PROFILE

The customer is a globally known telecommunications provider based out of the United States and part-owned by a high-profile European telecommunications provider. It has over 200 million subscribers across the United States, Netherlands and parts of Eastern Europe.

THE PROBLEM

The weekend is a prime testing period for the telecommunication company’s technical team. Considering that over 200 million customers around the world depend on its digital estate, it’s an opportunity that can’t go to waste.

Late one Saturday night, Origina’s support team received a Priority One (P1) ticket from the customer. The support technician and independent Global IBM® Experts quickly actioned it and were on the phone with the technical team less than 10 minutes from the call being placed.

The ticket was logged for the company’s IBM® Sterling B2B Integrator solution, which serves as a file transfer gateway. However, the incident was for the company’s Quality and Testing (QAT) environment which is a non-production environment.

Issues within testing environments are commonly logged as Priority Four (P4) instead of P1 incidents because they aren’t as urgent to resolve as a system that’s live and handling mission-critical requests. Given how critical the weekend was for testing for this particular business solution, Origina classified the ticket as a high priority with a response level agreement of Priority 1.

THE SOLUTION

When the telecommunication provider’s technical team went to open the log file to see what errors were being written, it took two minutes for their system to open the document which is an incredibly slow loading speed for this type of solution. Origina’s support team quickly realized the incident was a performance issue having to do with the system and not within the IBM application itself.

After the customer’s hardware team couldn’t immediately diagnose any issues, Origina’s support team stayed on the call through to 6 a.m. the next morning. During the eight-hour long call the team was actively troubleshooting various components, like the database, integrated applications and even adjusting configurations. By the time the call was over, the customer was able to get its QAT environment running, albeit at a much slower speed than usual.

Origina’s GIEs then provided the telecommunication provider’s team with a script to verify that the database was running smoothly. While it typically took 20 to 40 seconds to run, it took over a half an hour for it to run on the customer’s system.

Origina’s support team concluded the error had to do with the performance of the system. The customer’s technical team went to work with its hardware team to identify the problem.

THE RESULT

Issues arising from the digital infrastructure aren’t always clear cut. Often, the case ends up being a problem with the environment rather than a single application. Origina’s approach to customer success treats both in the same and aim to provide a solution whenever an IBM product is involved.

Due to the critical importance that the telecommunication provider’s QAT played during the weekend in the eyes of its IT operations team, Origina treated the incident as a P1 for the first 10+ hours after it was logged.

Ultimately, the problem was correctly identified as a performance issue and solved by increasing the available physical CPU and memory. Origina’s team was able to provide advice on performance tuning to help ensure the technical team didn’t run into the same challenges down the line.

The customer’s IT operations gained the confidence that Origina would support its goals, even within non-critical environments like its QAT.