Case Study: Boston-Based University achieves deep Banner visibility and halves troubleshooting time with ExtraHop

An East Coast University Gains Deep Insights with ExtraHop

A Boston-based, East Coast business school with a 50‑person IT team struggled to support a patchwork of departmental applications plus campus services (email, student portal, Blackboard) that all depended on a central Banner/Oracle system. Poor visibility into how applications interacted with the Banner database made it hard to diagnose performance problems, and past agent‑based monitoring attempts were abandoned over concerns about production impact.

The school deployed an agent‑less ExtraHop appliance to capture L2–L7 wire data and correlate activity across tiers; within 30 minutes the team could show DBAs which tables each application used and which queries were slow. The result: troubleshooting time dropped by about 50%, more than 500,000 database errors were uncovered and fixed, proactive alerts prevented Blackboard crashes from large uploads, and developers, DBAs, and administrators gained the insight to optimize and safely deploy applications.