Cerner monitoring in healthcare IT management

There are several challenges that healthcare organizations face when monitoring Cerner Millennium:

• Errors during transaction processing can result in rejected insurance claims, delay healthcare delivery, and impact revenue cycle processes. It is paramount to detect such errors proactively and to fix them quickly.
• Cerner Millennium is a large, complex suite of applications with many inter-relationships and impacts that are not easily visible; DNS/AD servers are used for user authentication, Apache web servers are the front-end, F5 is used for load-balancing, Java technologies are extensively used with IBM WebSphere, and Apache Tomcat is used as middleware. Backend technologies can be Oracle, Microsoft SQL, or MySQL. When slowness occurs, it can take a lot of manual analysis to determine where the root cause of the problem lies.

Monitoring of IT resources (CPU, memory, disk, etc.) are no longer sufficient for critical healthcare applications such as Cerner Millennium. eG Enterprise helps healthcare IT organizations in many ways:

• Healthcare IT administrators can measure digital user experience actively using Synthetic User Monitoring and passively using Real-User Monitoring to enhance customer satisfaction and productivity
• Real User Monitoring (RUM) identifies the time when user experience is poor, the affected geographical location, and then isolates page load issues and JavaScript errors, drills down into slow transaction and finds out the origin (frontend, backend, network, storage, etc.)

eG Enterprise enables healthcare organizations to move away from a reactive and siloed approach to monitoring:

• Using a combination of synthetic and real-user monitoring, healthcare IT teams can keep tabs on user experience, irrespective of whether users access Millennium through a web interface or via Citrix/VDI.
• Our universal monitoring technology monitors every layer and every tier of the Cerner Millennium architecture.
• A patented root-cause diagnosis engine correlates performance across the different tiers in real time and automatically pin-points the root cause of any issues.
• IT admins and architects also have insights into a wealth of analytics that can help them right-size and optimize their deployments and plan for future growth.

Java technology is the core of Cerner Millennium. While many Cerner monitoring tools provide external insights into performance of the healthcare applications, eG Enterprise goes far deeper, providing detailed insights into all aspects of Java processing.

• Monitor each Java virtual machine (JVM) in-depth. Learn if heap size is configured sufficiently, whether there are any memory leaks in the application, whether there are any deadlocks during application processing, etc.
• Track the performance of the Java middleware, whether it is IBM WebSphere or Apache Tomcat. Get insights into thread pool utilization, database connection pool availability, and servlet processing times.

Citrix/VDI technology is often used to publish Cerner client apps for user access. While monitoring tools for Java technologies do not have visibility into Citrix/VDI, monitoring tools for Citrix/VDI do not support Java applications well.

eG Enterprise is unique in its ability to monitor both Java technologies and Citrix/VDI technologies equally well:

• Our Citrix logon simulator provides a simple way to track logon availability and performance.
• Monitor all aspects of Citrix/VDI user experience, including logon times, application launch times, screen refresh latency, etc., for every user session.

Performance issues in any IT tier can impact user experience. Bottlenecks in the server operating system, virtualization tier, storage, message queues, or the backend database can adversely affect performance. Use eG Enterprise's universal monitoring technology to track KPIs for each tier. Machine learning capabilities in eG Enterprise enable it to quickly identify anomalies in any KPI value. Color-coded topology views make it easy for even helpdesk personnel to detect where the real problems lie and to get the right domain experts involved. This results in faster diagnosis of problems, improved user satisfaction, and even increased operational efficiency.

eG Enterprise's multi-dimensional performance monitoring helps healthcare IT professionals track the performance of all the tiers of a Cerner deployment including networks, storage, virtualization, Citrix, Java, middleware, Windows, and other platforms. With its deep monitoring capabilities, you can get the metrics that matter at your fingertips and identify and resolve problems in minutes rather than hours.

With eG Enterprise, healthcare organizations can:

• Ensure higher uptime and performance of Cerner Millennium applications, thereby enabling timely patient access to healthcare services
• Rapidly troubleshoot and diagnose problems, thereby improving the efficiency and productivity of the healthcare IT team