What Customers Are Saying About Ambeo Database Access Auditing for Usage Management

Ambeo customers have generated immediate successes in usage management using Ambeo products and solutions. Here are just some examples of the immediate return on investment for customers representing the leading pharmaceutical, healthcare, telecommunications, financial, insurance, and retail companies in the world.
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Data Load Time Savings

"Our developers maintain a variety of summary tables. With Ambeo, we found out which of these tables were actually being used. We were able to save data load time and processor/DASD resources when we discontinued building summary tables that were not being used."


Enterprise Wide Usage Knowledge

"Since we started using Ambeo, I can now tell whether users ever query the SALES_RETAIL column in the DW_POS_DAY table. I can ensure that our new aggregate tables are being used in relation to other fact tables. I can tell most anything one wants to know about the use, performance, and activity of our system enterprise wide. Our databases tools cannot deliver the same value."


Hardware Cost Savings

"In our environment, we let users build their own queries and submit them at will into our data warehouse. As a result, many bad queries are submitted. We run a 'worst 20 queries' report each week that allows us to educate our users on properly tuned queries. The users like the education, and we like not having to upgrade our hardware as often."


Detecting Unused Applications

"Reviewing reports on user activity and applications, we found that we were paying for too many licensed applications that were not being used. On further examination we discovered that many users were not aware of the tools they have at their disposal. As a result, we have found great cost savings in decreasing our software tools licenses, and greater empowerment of our end users through targeted training."


Maintenance Timing/Cost Savings

"Prior to understanding our system’s performance patterns and our user activity trends, we carried out our maintenance at night. Ambeo has shown us how we can greatly reduce overtime maintenance costs by scheduling maintenance during certain times of the day when user activity is low."


Migration Ease

"We migrated some of our data to a new platform for various reasons, but we did not realize that users were not accessing the new platform. Ambeo uncovered databases that were not being accessed at all, and resulted in a speedy migration of our applications."


Optimal Performance

“Many OLAP query tools provide extensive statistics regarding report usage. However, they fall short in terms of actual database usage statistics…. we can identify opportunities within the data warehouse to provide optimal performance.”
Terry Porter, DBA
EDS


Partitioning

"We developed an optimal partitioning strategy based on Ambeo’s collected data access history, and user access methods. Without this information we would have been taking a shot in the dark."


Performance and Responsiveness

“Ambeo has helped us enhance performance and responsiveness for key users. Now we can better allocate hardware usage.”
Steve Barlow, Manager, Enterprise Data Warehouse Department
Intermountain Health Care


Power User Management

"Our organization has power users that really stretch our system resources, but without the most rows returned by user report we would have never known who they were. Now we know, and we have improved performance for everyone by moving our power users to their own server. Typically we would have improved performance through expensive hardware upgrades, but this informed approach achieved the same end with virtually no additional costs."


Proactive Management

"Ambeo's Usage Tracker was chosen for its ability to provide data usage information that allows our company to be proactive in dealing with data warehousing issues. This has enabled us to improve the ability of the data warehouse to quickly deliver high value information to our business users. Usage Tracker is an extremely valuable tool for our information warehouse environment and has proved to be a major asset. We increased efficiency, lowered costs and met or exceeded the expectations of our end user community."


Query Tuning

"The most powerful report we employ is the 50 Longest Running Queries. As the 80/20 rule states -- 80% of performance bottlenecks are typically created by only 20% of the queries. After targeting and tuning the SQL statements for these long running queries, we found our average query end time significantly dropped. It would have been easy -- but expensive -- to throw more money into hardware."


Query Statistics

"For the first time, we are now able to track who is using the data and the number and type of queries that are being submitted by time of day. This gives us real statistics that help to optimize business use. With Usage Tracker, we anticipate being able to more effectively leverage the investment and to better understand usage patterns of our Information Warehouse. This will allow us to appropriately utilize our existing resources and better serve our internal and external users."


Repetition

"We instantly realized a return on our investment when we installed Ambeo. We had no idea how many queries we were running a day, but we guessed around 10,000. We were surprised to find we were running in excess of 100,000 queries a day. Without the Repetitive Query report we would have never known that one of our applications queried our databases separately for every row of data it returned. We retired that reporting tool, and found performance increased instantly."


Return on Investment

"Ambeo's software helps us accurately answer the data warehousing ROI question that is paramount for information technology decision makers. We in essence have taken the risk out of building and maintaining data warehouses and Ambeo’s products have helped us further guarantee the success of our projects."


Summary Tables

"Our DBA’s used the Ambeo reports to understand if there were multi table joins requested against large tables on a regular basis. They were able to introduce efficiencies by building a summary table for these situations."


Support

"Our business users demanded 24X7 support for certain applications resulting in expensive support costs to achieve SLA’s. Ambeo’s usage reports made clear that many of these applications were only ever accessed during normal business hours, and did not merit the demand for such costly support."


Tune for Efficiency

“The most important feature was the ability to know who and what our customers were doing so we could improve our data warehouse star schema collections.”
Craig Owen, Informatics Manager of the Department of Medical Informatics,
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center


Upgrades

"As our user base has grown, our client tools have aged and become obsolete. Prior to employing the reports on application usage we had no idea who was using what application. Now our application upgrade strategy is verified against the Ambeo reports, and our IT support specialists are saving time and money by only having to focus on a standard set of applications."


User Access

"We had assumed that our users were not accessing the data via the Web and were planning to disable Web access as a user option. The integration of the Ambeo product immediately indicated that assumptions regarding Web users were off the mark and in fact, Web access was critical to the company's business. Follow up evidenced that this was true especially for users such as the remote sales force. While there may have been minor cost savings realized by terminating Web access capabilities, these savings would certainly have been overshadowed by the negative affect for the users who were relying on the Web for data. The Ambeo integration proved a timely and fortunate solution for this organization's warehouse."