"A lot of the application performance management tools that are out there, you have to load an agent either onto a server or a desktop or something like that," Wright explains. " a lot of applications, if you put an agent on that application, you might break it."

Before the new healthcare-specific edition came out, Seattle Children's was using ExtraHop "mostly for monitoring our virtual desktop performance," says Wright. "Then we were a beta partner with HL7 folks."

Application interface engineers "historically  keep track of their HL7 messaging in their interfaces via a spreadsheet, and really don't have any kind of performance monitoring around what's happening with those interfaces," he explains. "But you put ExtraHop in there, that can now look at HL7 messaging, and determine what interface that is going to and coming from. All of a sudden I can see a clear picture of the performance of that interface."

For instance, Seattle Children's uses both Epic and Cerner technology.

"Epic is our registration and scheduling, and Cerner is our clinicals, so there's an HL7 interface from Epic into Cerner on any registration that we do," he says. "If we have someone come into our ED, somebody comes into out ED they'll get registered in Epic and then show up in Cerner. And if that slows down for some reason then the physician can't do their documentation in Cerner when they need to.

"So now it gives me peace of mind: I can set the parameters on what good performance is," says Wright. "ExtraHop does that for me. It sets my upper control limit, lower control limit and then the mean for this particular HL7 interface transaction, receiving and sending."

"Any time stuff starts to slow down, it sounds an alarm," he adds. "Then I can go look at the interface and not have to wait for someone in the ED to call and say, 'Hey, I registered so-and-so into Epic and it's not flowing over into Cerner.' Before ExtraHop, that's kind of what we had to do."

But the "very cool thing," says Wright, "is that it's super non-intrusive to our production environment. There aren't any agents. It's just sucking the data off of the wire and no one else is aware of it."