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NHS IT under 24-hour surveillance
Case study: Birmingham Trust gets a software health check

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Tuesday 20 March 2007

The University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust has started monitoring its software systems to predict problems and avoid outages.

The Trust is using NetIQ AppManager to monitor the running of its IT services from an end-user perspective and measure application performance.

It already had some tools in place to monitor its hardware estate but needed the technology to scrutinise shared applications such as its email or radiology systems.

Stephen Chilton, technical architecture manager for IT services at the University Hospital Birmingham, told silicon.com the Trust did not previously have the capacity to answer key questions in terms of how the applications were performing for the end users.

Chilton said: "Being in a centralised data centre, our perception of how things are ticking over and working could clearly be different to an end user's perception."

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The NetIQ AppManager also stores historical data on how hardware and software applications have been performing over the past six to 12 months - giving the Trust an idea of what apps may be over-worked or prone to problems in the future.

Chilton said: "NetIQ has been able to put us in a better position where we can understand through the information it gathers if we have some looming problems."

Chilton added the Trust can now plan upgrades much more effectively and can consequently mitigate the risk of outages or loss of service.

The NetIQ toolkit has also helped the IT department evaluate whether an application can be pushed onto its virtualisation network - freeing up servers and subsequently using less energy.

Chilton said NetIQ has definitely improved the Trust's operational efficiency in terms of how to deliver IT services.

But calculating a return on investment is "part of a patience game", he said, adding NetIQ AppManager needs to run for some time before data can be captured and presented in a meaningful manner.

The NHS Foundation Trust runs two hospitals in the Birmingham area which together provide more than 553,000 patients with treatment every year.