A large healthcare organization with mission-critical uptime requirements depended on InterSystems HealthShare as the backbone of its health information exchange platform. Over the years, the environment had grown massively in both scale and complexity. What began as a manageable deployment evolved into an enterprise federation encompassing: hundreds of servers, thousands of interfaces, hundreds of namespaces, and nearly ten thousand Ensemble services, processes, and operations.
The complexity created an operational blind spot. Traditional monitoring provided reactive alarms but failed to deliver predictive insights or actionable intelligence across such a sprawling infrastructure. As VPN connections, interfaces, and mirrored InterSystems IRIS servers expanded, the risks multiplied. The objective became clear:
Introduce historical trending and forecasting for critical HealthShare components.
Establish threshold-based alerting to detect anomalies before end-users noticed issues.
Guarantee high availability and proactive monitoring across mirrored IRIS environments.
Without a scalable solution, the organization risked outages, missed SLAs, and degraded patient and partner trust.
June 2023
Healthcare
Operational Excellence
The healthcare organization already had a traditional Network Management System (NMS) in place, but it could only see half the picture. While it did a decent job monitoring core infrastructure, servers, interfaces, and connectivity, it was blind to the unique layers of InterSystems HealthShare. The existing NMS couldn’t track database growth, Ensemble queues, journaling synchronization, or the service volumes that truly defined the platform’s health. The result was an incomplete view of a mission-critical environment.
That’s where THIRD SPECTRUM stepped in. Our team searched for a cost-effective solution that could replace the existing platform while extending visibility deeper into the application stack. After a careful evaluation of tools, we chose PRTG. Its native ability to monitor across Layers 1–7 gave us the flexibility to bridge the gap, moving beyond just infrastructure metrics and into the operational heartbeat of HealthShare and IRIS.
With this approach, the customer didn’t just get more monitoring, they got complete operational awareness of HealthShare for the first time.
We engineered a PRTG-based monitoring solution tightly integrated with InterSystems HealthShare and IRIS, delivering custom probes, sensors, and dashboards for predictive visibility across the federation. This wasn’t just monitoring—it was operational transformation.
We developed sensors to track used vs. available database space in IRIS. Trending consumption enabled capacity forecasting, preventing emergency expansions and ensuring storage growth was deliberate and controlled.
By monitoring queue depths, we gave the organization the ability to detect service backlogs in real time. Threshold alerts triggered when volumes deviated from established baselines, providing early warnings of interface slowdowns or abnormal spikes.
PRTG was customized to capture throughput data across Ensemble services. This historical trending revealed macro-level shifts in service volumes, helping IT leaders understand growth drivers like new partnerships or onboarding initiatives, and accurately plan resources.
To safeguard mirrored IRIS environments, we created custom sensors that validated journaling synchronization in real time. Alerts were triggered instantly if journals fell out of sync, ensuring corrective action could be taken before downtime or data loss occurred.
Each component contributed to a holistic monitoring architecture that bridged the gap between real-time troubleshooting and long-term predictive planning.
The integration of PRTG with InterSystems HealthShare and IRIS delivered transformative results. The organization shifted from reactive incident management to proactive operations, gaining confidence in its ability to sustain mission-critical uptime.
Proactive Capacity Management: Database trending eliminated last-minute expansion emergencies and gave IT leaders foresight into storage needs.
Faster Problem Detection: Queue depth and throughput alerts enabled issues to be caught before they impacted patients, providers, or partners.
Improved Forecasting: Long-term Ensemble service analysis provided executives with accurate system growth insights for budget and resource planning.
High Availability Assurance: Journaling monitors protected mirrored environments, safeguarding continuity and compliance.
End-to-End Visibility: Real-time monitoring combined with predictive analytics created a complete view of HealthShare’s operational health.
Ultimately, the customer transformed their monitoring practice into a strategic, predictive discipline, ensuring healthcare data flowed seamlessly across the federation. With THIRD SPECTRUM’s expertise, they achieved more than monitoring, they gained the operational resilience to keep critical healthcare services always on.
Complex
API, dotnet, InterSystems HealthShare, InterSystems IRIS, Microsoft SQL, PRTG, Python
