As an organisation we at Zeus can sometimes get really focused on our technology, and forget why the Zeus Traffic Manager was developed in the first place. Speaking to a customer of ours at a recent Cloud Camp, brought my focus back to that place.
Whether it is simply improving the customer experience or helping creating real value in an online appliction. Application delivery is there to improve the bottom line results. No company would deploy this technology unless (in some way) it helped their business.
Our customer (hello Steven) has been using Zeus Traffic Manager for a few years now and has progressed to become a Level 30 Script Wizard. He manages an online operation that sells quite high value packages.
One problem he has, and I am sure this is similar to many people in this type of position, is that sometimes the operational staff lose sight of exactly what the application traffic on
their network actually equates to. It just becomes "the job" and the value of a particular transaction almost becomes invisible.
Therefore when some maintenance is scheduled, and a server node is put into "Draining" (not permitting new connections, but allowing existing ones to time out) sometimes impatience can get the better of a SysAdmin. Instead of waiting until there are no connections left on the draining node, it could be taken out of service when there are just 3 or 4 left. Without knowledge of the value to the business contained in these customer's shopping baskets, this seems a minor thing to do. However, if you knew that the combined value of those baskets was £10,000 you might think twice about shutting the server down too soon.
For this reason our customer put in place a Traffic Script rule (gathering the value of all the shopping baskets associated with a server) to help illustrate how much turning off a particular server could possibly cost the business (assuming the interuption caused the customer to leave and never come back). Because pictures say a thousand words, the data from the rule was pushed into the Zeus Traffic Manager's graphing functionality within the web based user interface.
The result is that the operational staff are able, at a glance, to see the present value of all the active customer connections on the draining server. Hopefully, convincing them to wait a few minutes more before pulling the plug on a server for an upgrade.
Nick Bond
