NFF consulted with the District of Columbia Health Benefit Exchange Authority (HBX) to help the Application Operations and Maintenance (O&M) team assess application and server performance management capabilities for the DC Health Exchange Production Environment. The O&M team needed a dynamic tool to measure and report on the Health Exchange application performance metrics and provide key insights into the multitude of application code layers, application servers, system interfaces, and external links that make up the platform. The HBX O&M team wanted to take a unique approach of implementing performance measurement tools for DC's HBX application prior to any end user impact and as a predictive tool to sample new software releases for potential performance issues prior to production implementation. This approach would not only alert the team immediately if there were any production bottlenecks, but also allow potential issues to be resolved by development teams prior to production roll out.
NFF, along with partner Riverbed, deployed a proof of concept (POC) pilot that captured and monitored live performance metrics of the various infrastructure and application components. The pilot was successful in identifying the needed metrics, functionality, and insight the O&M team needed to create a proactive and predictive stance.
The Healthcare Exchange was able to demonstrate that implementation of Riverbed’s SteelCentral AppInternals and NetSensor solutions would allow them to cost effectively address the requirement without overwhelming capital investment costs. The solution is able to monitor all the key application components including servers, application code execution, and network performance metrics to provide a complete proactive and predictive application performance management environment and ensure optimal end user experience of DC’s HBX.
Since April 2013, NFF has assisted HBX with multiple projects. NFF currently provides a large team of IT professionals on a full-time basis under a multi-year staffing contract.
