How Do You Get the Most Benefit by Supporting Monitoring with Automation?

SolarWinds brought monitoring products to new levels in an organization with offices and employees in multiple countries around the world, providing maximum efficiency for the IT team.

It may seem that large organizations need a great global monitoring system, but it is necessary to choose ways to work smarter to support IT teams by embracing technology and customization.

Need

With the participation of many companies from various countries of the world over the years, it was now a global company. This has led to complexity in IT departments. IT teams from different countries needed to collaborate and consolidate with network and system administrators with different methodologies and different suppliers.

Challenges

Before the company went global, it had a small SolarWinds environment. After growth took place, many legacy solutions were now too niche and could not meet the needs of both the company and the team. The cost of maintaining these solutions was also becoming irritating.

The team’s biggest challenge was to consolidate the monitoring solution and increase its efficiency with an extremely small global system monitoring team for its size.

At this point, IT managers decided to focus on SolarWinds and increased their benefits by using all necessary modules of SolarWinds . Although the IT infrastructure is now huge, it is managed by a two-person team and the remaining IT team is involved in more value-added tasks such as systems optimization. Company executives explained that the most important knowledge they gained during this whole process was that “IT cannot be fixed in a single area” and added the following words:

“You need to be able to talk to the network team in terms they will understand, be able to go back and talk to someone in infrastructure or security right away, and demonstrate capabilities in a way they will understand from their point of view.”

Solution with SolarWinds

Corporation has gone to adopt a more tailored solution, leveraging a combination of modules and “out-of-the-box” templates with the SolarWindsOrion® Platform; decided to take advantage of customization and integration with other systems.

How was the solution implemented?

The entire environment, consisting of thousands of devices, was watched. The organization had different departments and teams that used many SolarWinds modules for various reasons. It had thousands of servers and an extensive network infrastructure. Basically every device in the company started to be monitored, such as power distribution, USPs, PDUs, air conditioner thermostats, UNDP.

Additionally, during a storage area network (SAN) consolidation, the team needed to know the usage details of the various SANs to plan upgrades based on needs. Analysis and reporting tools in SRM allowed the team to efficiently provide the required standardized data in the desired format. A simple afternoon’s work saved IT teams weeks.

The team has also recently begun replacing the older, manual methods with DHCP integration and automatic scanning using the SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM). Changes were made automatically using IPAM to determine where each device in the SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) module is and connect them to report systems.

In addition, automation and customization were used to enable the team to adapt during the migration of applications and services to the cloud . SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) and SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) modules were used for virtualization and storage teams. For example, SolarWinds VMAN data was used during a recent migration. Using the SolarWinds API integration, the management was able to see data from other reporting tools in live charts.

For example, SolarWinds VMAN data was used during a recent migration. Using the SolarWinds API integration, the management was able to see data from other reporting tools in live charts.

Solution Benefits

Transitioning to automating was thought to be difficult, given that many of the teams had established past processes and procedures. But when it was clearly demonstrated how this process could be managed more efficiently, teams saw the benefits, supported compliance with #SolarWinds , and were open to it.

IT teams use the SolarWinds API extensively, in their own words, “for almost everything.” They have integrated this with on-premises solutions such as configuration management database (CMDB) and perform two-way synchronization. Initially, users were used to pull properties, but now they are seeing the benefits of using data in SolarWinds.

SolarWinds now reaches all areas of the IT environment;

It pulls in large amounts of data and outputs large amounts of data.

When troubleshooting IT teams can see the environment with a single solution to easily identify where the root cause might be.

IT teams use the AppStack and PerfStack features of the SolarWinds Orion Platform. When an end user has a problem with their service or website, AppStack helps them efficiently identify whose problem it is (network, infrastructure, database, application, etc.)

PerfStack helps in troubleshooting and discussing root causes of unknown issues among teams. IT teams use customizable charts and graphs to depict issues that need to be resolved. They can highlight a problem and identify what’s happening in other layers at the same time.

Today, IT teams are gaining increased efficiency with customizations using SolarWinds products. As teams’ needs change, the monitoring team can adjust various SolarWinds modules to ensure consistency of displays and alarms, reducing troubleshooting time and simplifying IT teams’ work.

Teams can customize widgets with the SolarWinds API and export information for migration, such as live graphics for external documents. Graphs can show historical and real-time data across departments and managers for greater visibility into how migrations are going.

According to feedback from IT teams, end users are also experiencing the benefits of automation. End users like to receive the data they want, in the format they want, with the alarms they want. This helps them do their job and make their day easier.

Time to include automation into IT!

Increased productivity thanks to customized modules

Reduced troubleshooting times

Customizable widgets with SolarWinds APIs

Monitoring with real-time and historical data