Zenoss

Sierra Wireless, a leading IoT solutions provider, was facing challenges in delivering industry-specific solutions for advanced IoT endeavors. The company was using multiple monitoring tools, which resulted in tremendous inefficiencies. They were looking for a way to reliably connect edge devices to the cloud, develop software/API services to manage processes associated with billions of connected assets, and offer a platform to extract real-time data to help customers make the best business decisions. The company sought to deploy an enterprise-wide troubleshooting solution to get complete visibility and prevent IT service incidents, going far beyond simple health checks from traditional IT monitoring tools. They also wanted to aggregate and correlate massive volumes of events to sift through the noise to get only meaningful alerts about impacted services and automate alert assignments to teams with external integrations by accurately routing them.

Huntington Bank had 37 monitoring tools in their IT environment, including many with multiple subcomponents, which resulted in siloed event visibility and excessive response/resolution times for administrators. They needed to consolidate their server, network, operating system (OS), application, database and security monitoring operations for a unified enterprise view. The bank had distributed product groups with a central IT team that serviced all of them, a common scenario for large financial institutions. They had also experienced a rapid growth in the number of services they needed to deliver, accompanied by accelerated complexity of the infrastructure required to support the new services. Huntington’s IT Ops team was challenged to manage service offerings that spanned a diverse set of technologies, from legacy mainframe systems to dynamic virtual infrastructure. The decentralization and specialization that occurred as Huntington’s infrastructure expanded to address new service demands such as mobility, self-service, cloud capabilities and more had caused the number of tools monitoring these diverse technologies to increase dramatically.

Nutanix, a global leader in cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, was facing a challenge in unifying monitoring across infrastructure, applications, databases, directory services and more. They were seeking to improve their ability to ensure application performance by getting service-centric visibility. The company began to evaluate a number of monitoring solutions and found many of the options to be complicated, which was a “showstopper” for Nutanix. It was critically important that the monitoring platform they chose provide total visibility with low overhead, enhancing their team’s agility as new services get deployed. The monitoring requirements identified by Nutanix included incorporating performance metrics and fault events for F5 load balancers, checking web portal function with synthetic web transactions, notifying in advance of SSL certificate expirations, digging deep into Tomcat Java JMX applications by gathering thread counts, heap memory and open file descriptors, tracking MySQL database essentials like data and index sizes, open connections and tables, and join statistics, and supporting core Active Directory infrastructure by collecting number of connections and sessions, read/write activity, bind times, and cache hit rates.

The BBC was facing a challenge with the changing landscape of broadcast technology. As more people started consuming news and entertainment online, the BBC needed to ensure they could deliver an exceptional customer experience through this medium. They had adopted continuous delivery and DevOps across their groups and transitioned significant infrastructure and services to public clouds. However, they were concerned about the risk of a degraded customer experience due to their chaotic and disparate monitoring approach. The BBC had a diverse infrastructure with many discrete monitoring tools in place, some of which were running on individual PCs that would frequently crash. The NOC team had to constantly monitor multiple dashboards in different applications, making it difficult to identify actionable events and respond quickly.

Central 1 Credit Union provides wholesale financial products, trust services, payment processing solutions and digital banking services to roughly 300 credit unions and institutional clients across Canada. To ensure the security and reliability of their customer data and organizational systems and achieve their core goals of client centricity and operational excellence, Central 1 needed complete visibility into their complex cloud, virtual and physical IT environments. Central 1 had a number of pain points around monitoring its primary services. With its previous monitoring approach, Central 1 was unable to tell when services were degraded or impacted by a server outage or other IT event. Although Central 1 was using ServiceNow for IT incident reporting and management, it was difficult for IT team members in separate offices to work together to resolve service disruptions, and maintaining accurate data across all locations required time-consuming manual updates.

TransUnion, a global credit reporting and information management services company, had a complex IT operation spread across 30+ countries. The company's business revolves around reliable, secure information management and the exchange of massive amounts of data. The IT team was responsible for monitoring strategic initiatives globally. However, before Zenoss, TransUnion had multiple unconnected monitoring tools that were islands unto themselves, costing the company a great deal of money. The IT team had huge gaps in monitoring capabilities because the tools were unreliable and there was no integration between disparate tools or systems.

WEX Health, a leading provider of cloud-based health care financial management solutions, was facing the challenge of delivering uninterrupted value to its customers, which required guaranteeing an uptime of five 9s (99.999%). They needed a cloud-based monitoring solution that delivered the same level of reliability as their own software. The company's IT infrastructure spans both cloud and on-premises virtualized environments. They were looking for a solution that was automatically updated and maintained and that had a built-in support system so they could focus on optimizing and supporting their own products and services.

Surescripts’ primary concern is seamlessly maintaining a high volume of secure transactions and ensuring they are correctly routed — so there is immense pressure on the Surescripts IT department to respond to service needs immediately and resolve issues without delay. Surescripts was driven to become a more dependable and predictable IT partner, defining rigorous processes and service-level agreements to build trust with their customers — the other departments within the company. In 2013, they set out to greatly improve their enterprise-wide systems management and implement best practices around IT service management (ITSM) and IT infrastructure library (ITIL) processes. As a core part of this transformation, they selected ServiceNow as their ITSM solution and wanted a comprehensive monitoring solution that integrated with ServiceNow to improve response times by eliminating the “noise” of multiple alerts coming from multiple monitoring tools.

Netic A/S, a managed application operations service for public and private customers in Denmark, was founded in 2003 on the basis that IT operations could be done smarter and better than was typically the case. Since that time, Netic has become increasingly specialized in application operations, which involves monitoring the entire stack from bare metal to the application itself. For that reason, Netic was on the hunt for a solution that had to perform on a range of important parameters, including: Ability to handle monitoring across the entire stack, with a focus on infrastructure, Scalability, and Cost-effectiveness. As a managed service provider, Netic requires a monitoring platform that enables segregation of duties and is able to scale both horizontally and vertically. These issues meant that Netic struggled to efficiently provide top value for customers — and in a competitive environment, this can rapidly become critical. For that reason, a project was initiated to identify, test and onboard a new monitoring solution.

The El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) is one of the top 100 largest districts in the U.S. with 60,000 students and 9,000 staff spread across 100 campuses over 250 square miles. The IT team, led by Steve Crye, was facing challenges with their previous monitoring software. The team was frustrated with the lack of a 'big picture' view of the network. They were receiving multiple emails about any issue, and had to run reports to get actionable information. Furthermore, Steve had to escalate issues to the sales staff of the previous vendor to get adequate tech support, which was not an efficient process. The team was also tasked with bringing up as many as 2 new school campuses each year and managing other large projects, adding to their workload.

The Information Technology Department (ITD) for the State of North Dakota provides IT operations for nearly all of the state’s government entities. They also provide network access to K-12, Higher-ed, and various regional facilities via a statewide network. The IT operations team was tasked with monitoring presidential and state election services. However, the team faced major obstacles in making intelligent decisions about their IT environment. The tools they had in place were inconsistent among the various platforms and much of the infrastructure had no performance monitoring at all. If a problem arose they did ad-hoc monitoring with system tools but had no real visibility into the past. This made it very difficult to diagnose and apply corrections to application performance problems. They needed a monitoring system in place that would not only track the entire performance of their system over a long period of time, but would also be able to correlate the impact of different services and devices in their infrastructure.

NWN Corporation is a managed service provider that serves both the public and private sectors and that has rapidly grown to more than 600 staff members and 13 worldwide locations. The company prides itself on delivering tailored solutions to fit each client’s specific needs and situation. As part of evolving IT to serve the business, more companies are adopting or planning to adopt advanced technologies in virtualization, converged infrastructure, and cloud platforms. While efficiency of service delivery typically increases with these technologies, the additional IT environment complexity often means organizations need external expertise. This continues to drive the case for managed services, for which NWN is a leader because of the breadth and depth of their service offerings. One such new offering is NCloud Hosted Collaboration (dial tone, presence, video, contact center enterprise) from their NWN-built public cloud, and is based on Cisco Unified Communication software running on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware and Cisco Nexus networking equipment supported by VMware vSphere virtualization software and EMC storage. To support new customer growth for this service, NWN needed to find a scalable, highly customizable monitoring solution that also provided complete coverage for the large base of existing managed service customers.

Rackspace Hosting, a leading IT hosting company, was facing a challenge in ensuring the uptime of over 13,000 Cisco network devices spread across its extensive customer base. The company had outgrown its network management tools and required a new network monitoring solution that had deeper out-of-the-box functionality, could meet its extreme scalability requirements, and could be easily configured to address Rackspace’s unique environment. In summer 2007, the company began to evaluate a number of network monitoring solutions. However, the proprietary solutions lacked the flexibility Rackspace required; they couldn’t get them to fit their unique environment.

Unify, part of the Atos group, is a leading communications software and services brand, providing integrated communications and collaboration solutions for approximately 75 percent of the Fortune Global 500. The company needed to maintain its strong reputation for product reliability and security while continuing to provide customers with a seamless and efficient collaboration experience on any device. The primary concern of the Unify IT team is preventing network and application outages — or quickly identifying and remediating those that do occur. Before implementing Zenoss, Unify used a number of separate monitoring and reporting tools, each providing a limited view into a portion of their complex IT operations. The monitoring software previously used by Unify allowed only for fault management. Capturing performance data required Unify to deploy an additional set of tools from a separate vendor. And the tools were not easily expandable, making it costly and difficult to support Unify’s wide range of product offerings and keep up with continual version changes.

Ceridian was faced with the challenge of rapidly purchasing and deploying new hardware while simultaneously optimizing aging legacy hardware to maximize IT capacity for serving customer needs. A massive data center consolidation project exponentially increased the complexity of maintaining customer service levels. Ceridian’s ultimate concern during the transition was detecting potential and actual service disruptions before any customers were impacted. Ceridian’s ad hoc IT monitoring solution consisted of 12 different monitoring tools, including multiple with overlapping capabilities. They lacked a unified view of their systems that would help them pinpoint problems in real time, and they were also often spending an inordinate amount of time just searching for the source of the alert(s).

University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is a premier distance learning institution servicing 95,000 students worldwide. They had five data centers on three continents with approximately 1,500 hardware systems in operation. Because students tended to use the systems in massive, regular surges, there were capacity issues with UMUC’s legacy learning management system (LMS) and an array of third-party applications. With additional internal systems supporting everything from document management to human capital management, UMUC had a clear need for a unified monitoring platform. UMUC lacked visibility into issues that were affecting end users, so the UMUC IT staff was completely unaware of service interruptions in many cases. Once aware, they still had difficulty identifying the exact points in the infrastructure where the issues were occurring.

2degrees, a rapidly growing New Zealand mobile and broadband network provider, was expanding into the business customer segment. The company's top strategic driver was to provide the most consistent customer experience possible for its mobile and broadband end users. However, this was complicated by the company’s rapid organic and acquisition-fueled growth. They needed an IT monitoring solution that was flexible enough and scalable enough to adapt and grow with the company’s aggressive business strategy.

RMS has multiple data centers in widely distributed locations around the globe. To ensure the highest levels of availability, it was critical to find a monitoring solution that was flexible enough to support their existing systems while refining data access and analytic operations across its growing cloud-based infrastructure. Most customers were deploying the RMS software on premises for big data analytics, which required those customers to make significant infrastructure investments. To enable their large base of North American and European customers to reduce costs by running analytics on RMS infrastructure, they built data centers in London, Iceland and Toronto. Each data center was heavily populated with Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) and EMC VMAX enterprise storage. RMS was also expanding its own presence into the cloud and was embracing modern software such as Docker and Apache HBase. RMS recognized that managing these advanced technologies in a hybrid IT environment would require a uniquely flexible and scalable monitoring platform.