Case Study - System Monitoring

Database Development and Management

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

 

Client has an online shopping portal with the world’s biggest selection of books. It carries over 1.5 million titles. In order to sell the 1.5 million titles, client has created various "online storefronts" on websites such as Amazon.com, Ebay.com and Abebooks.com. These websites have an enormous client base which allows smaller, reputable businesses exposure to more buyers and gain overall exposure in the online shopping segment, while providing their own customer’s the opportunity to shop around the best price.

Business Situation

 

The client has all its setup based in the United States and its operations are spread across different countries. There was a need to have a complete monitoring of the client servers 24X7 and keep a check on performance issues round the clock.

Apart from the customer base ranging from different countries even the business associates like the partner sites and vendors were also spread across different countries and time zones. This required a team to take care of maintenance, exception handling, report analysis and thorough checking of the log files.

Solution

 

Q3 Technology has provided effective solution to all the above business requirements of the client. Since the time zone of the United States and India are complementary to each other, therefore round the clock monitoring of operations and servers is achieved.

Any exceptions generated from the system or the database are immediately caught and handled. The log files are analyzed as soon as they are generated. This helps the client in minimizing the breakdowns and server issues. The servers are being constantly monitored for disk space.

The servers do have adequate disk space but some processes occasionally get into infinite loops and end up taking all the disk space and/or causing a crash of the system. Such things are identified and the concerned processes are killed or managed immediately to avoid the disruption in the system. The same process is followed for the ‘data’ and ‘roll back’ segments and ‘users’ & ‘temp’ tablespaces of Oracle database.

 

Since the e-commerce sites are always susceptible to frauds, Q3 Technologies lends its service in this crucial aspect of the client’s business. Fraud sellers and buyers are identified based on their heavy selling/purchasing or by verifying orders having same shipping address but transactions done with different credit cards. Payment of such transactions are held back and released in parts thereby eliminating/minimizing the monetary losses to the client.

Benefits

 

  • Monitoring process being continuous due to different time zones.
  • Cost effective solution tailor-made for client’s requirement.
  • 24X7 monitoring of servers and WebPages.
  • Reduced frauds on the business channel.
  • Instant attention and fixing of exceptions and database errors.
  • Complete ownership of the process and innovative techniques to achieve optimum results.


Customer Speaks

blockquoteFaced with the need for more resources, we were initially hesitant about how it would work to outsource some development work. Q3 has been an ideal partner; we now think of them as an extension of our development team, and appreciate all their efforts to learn about our people and our products. They have been excellent at seeking clarification on design questions, and have increased the knowledge and depth of their team in response to our needs. We particularly appreciated their willingness to document their work using our internal systems, saving us administration time. We would not hesitate to recommend Q3 to anyone seeking a reliable, knowledgeable and conscientious development partner.blockquote
Sven Brindley
President, Breakwater Designs Limited.