A large healthcare organization with stringent 24x7x365 uptime requirements relied heavily on InterSystems HealthShare as the backbone of its health information exchange platform. Over the years, the organization’s technical environment grew in both size and complexity.
The expansion of VPN connections, interfaces, servers, and namespaces created significant operational challenges. The customer’s HealthShare federation included:
- Hundreds of servers
- Thousands of interfaces
- Hundreds of namespaces
- Nearly ten thousand Ensemble services, processes, and operations
This immense scale made maintaining continuous visibility and performance monitoring a daunting task.
The objective was clear:
- Introduce historical trending and forecasting for critical HealthShare components
- Establish threshold-based alerting to detect anomalies before end users noticed issues
- Ensure high availability and performance monitoring across mirrored InterSystems IRIS environments
Solution Delivered
To solve these challenges, our engineering team designed and implemented a PRTG-based monitoring solution tightly integrated with InterSystems HealthShare and InterSystems IRIS.
The solution provided custom probes, sensors, and dashboards capable of collecting, trending, and alerting on critical operational metrics across the federation. This transformed the monitoring environment from reactive troubleshooting into proactive operations management.
Key monitoring components delivered included:
Database Utilization vs Whitespace
We developed monitors to track the relationship between database used space and available whitespace within InterSystems IRIS databases.
This proactive visibility directly supported the customer’s high-availability requirements by preventing uncontrolled database expansion.
Ensemble Queue Depth Monitoring
PRTG was configured to monitor Ensemble queue depths, the number of messages waiting to be processed in the HealthShare environment.
- Purpose: Identify backlogs in real time and predict throughput challenges
- Value: After establishing a baseline of normal queue depths, we configured threshold alerts that triggered when queue depth deviated significantly from standard operations.
- Performance trends over time
- Macro-level increases or decreases in service traffic
- Purpose: Verify journals were synchronized in real time
- Value: Alert engineering teams instantly if journaling fell behind or failed, allowing immediate remediation before an outage or data loss occurred.
- Proactive Capacity Management: Database utilization vs. whitespace trending provided IT leaders with clear foresight into storage requirements, eliminating last-minute expansion emergencies.
- Faster Problem Detection: Threshold-based alerting on queue depth and service volumes enabled earlier detection of bottlenecks, often before customers or end-users were affected.
- Improved Forecasting: Long-term trending of Ensemble service volumes gave executives valuable insights into system growth patterns, supporting accurate budget forecasting and infrastructure planning.
- High Availability Assurance: Custom journaling monitors protected mirrored environments, ensuring business continuity and preventing downtime in production-critical systems.
- End-to-End Visibility: The solution bridged the gaps between real-time HealthShare monitoring and the historical, data-driven insights required for enterprise-level healthcare IT operations.
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This provided early detection of problems such as interface slowdowns, service bottlenecks, or abnormal traffic spikes, enabling engineering teams to resolve issues before impacting customers.
Ensemble Service Volume Analysis
A critical aspect of long-term monitoring was measuring message throughput across Ensemble services. PRTG was customized to capture and trend this data, providing historical visibility into both:
This analysis proved invaluable for capacity management and long-term growth planning. IT leaders could identify whether new interfaces, partnerships, or patient onboarding initiatives were causing measurable increases in system load, and allocate resources accordingly.
Journaling Status Monitoring for High Availability
Given the organization’s reliance on mirrored InterSystems IRIS servers for uptime guarantees, ensuring journaling synchronization was paramount.
We created a specialized monitoring sensor within PRTG that continuously checked journaling status between mirrored servers.
This enhancement significantly strengthened the customer’s ability to meet its mission-critical uptime requirements.
Results and Impact
The integration of PRTG with InterSystems HealthShare and InterSystems IRIS delivered substantial operational improvements:
Ultimately, the customer transformed its HealthShare monitoring approach from reactive firefighting into a strategic, predictive discipline. With PRTG’s flexibility and the tailored integration, the organization gained confidence in its ability to deliver always-on healthcare services to patients, providers, and partners.