Founded in 1998 as online brokerage firm, eQ has since evolved into a full-fledged online finance business, meeting the brokerage, asset management and banking needs of Finland's citizens, businesses and institutions. With a complex IT environment consisting of 250 physical and virtual machines, a wide variety of custom and proprietary banking software and a mix of legacy and newer web technologies, eQ needed an efficient way to guarantee optimal application and infrastructure performance on a 24/7 basis.

As their IT infrastructure grew and diversified and their homegrown monitoring solution became too complex to customize, eQ needed to find a new monitoring and management tool that could be up and running quickly and could handle the unique monitoring needs of a banking operation. After determining that the "Big 4" proprietary solutions were complicated, expensive and required too many resources to run and that most open source alternatives lacked the needed enterprise-class functionality, security and support, eQ found a perfect fit in Hyperic HQ Enterprise.

"Modern web environments are a blend of different homegrown, open source and commercial technologies and industry-specific software, and keeping track of all of these different moving parts can be nearly impossible without the right tool in place," said Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic. "HQ was designed with the needs of web environments in mind, which means it inherently handles diversity and scale and can easily extend to meet the specific needs of organizations like eQ bank."

The breadth and depth of the technology HQ monitors and HQ's extensibility and ease of customization have been major assets for eQ. eQ's environment is a broad mix of technologies, including Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems, Apache and Sun web servers, VMware virtualization and MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL databases. Hyperic supports all of these and most other technologies out-of-the-box. eQ's environment is also full of commercial and homegrown banking software. In addition to Hyperic's ready-to-run resource plugins, HQ's open framework makes it simple for eQ to create custom plugins as needed to incorporate their finance-specific technology into HQ's monitoring reach.

Additionally, HQ metrics have been used to problem solve within eQ. When eQ faced a slowdown in data transfer within its market information solution, it was important to prevent the localized issue from snowballing into a larger IT fire. However, slogging through log data to do so would have been time-intensive and inefficient. Instead, metrics collected from HQ were used to determine the location of and reason behind the problem so that eQ could resolve it before it led to performance glitches for end-users.

"During my 10 years at eQ, I have been exposed to many different monitoring tools, and none are as easy to extend and customize as HQ," said Janne Valkealahti, IT operations manager at eQ. "Implementing Hyperic's solution was a great decision - the technology has been a perfect fit for our banking business, and it has helped us manage growing demands without adding additional headcount to eQ's IT team. Even better, no matter how our needs change, the quality of the customer support we receive from Hyperic is always excellent. Hyperic knows more about monitoring and managing mission-critical web applications than any other company I've worked with."