Nature.com Success Story
Nature.com Improves Web Site Availability with Zenoss
The Challenge
Nature.com provides online visitors with access to a variety of Nature Publishing Group publications, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine. Since most of their customer contracts are subscription-based access to the scientific research and information made available through their web site, ensuring high availability, performance, and customer satisfaction are top priorities.
The customer's IT infrastructure consists of approximately 150 servers and devices in two separate locations -- a public-facing web co-location facility and a large server room that mangaes and pushes web content to the datacenter. The web hosting group is responsible for the web infrastructure behind Nature.com, as well as keeping their internal production tools and staging environments up and running.
Seeking a unified view of their systems and overall network, the Nature.com web hosting team's top priority was to upgrade their monitoring system and ensure devices were being properly added to the network. Because Nature.com depends upon high customer satisfaction and access to their web site, they wanted to improve web site availability and performance for customers visiting Nature.com.
As part of their system upgrade, the Nature.com team had additional goals around enhancing their internal capabilities and operational efficiences. In order to serve up web pages to their customers and consistently deliver content in a timely manner, they needed to improve their ability to quickly make changes to the development environment, decrease response times for making web site updates, and meet service performance requirements. At the end of the day, their success depends upon the public availability of the web site.
The Solution
Initially relying on an outsourcing vendor's monitoring portal for server and network health checks, Nature.com decided to insource the operations of their infrastructure. Zenoss' network monitoring capabilities provide a unified dashboard that gives Nature.com a complete view of their entire environment, including CPU, memory and application statistics.
This enables the Nature.com team to combine all the graphs and checks they were previously producing across a mixed group of homegrown and open source scripts intio a single view of the network. It also gives them the ability to gather long-term metrics that measure the performance and availabilty of their web site over time.
With an accurate, comprehensive view of systems and the ability to proactively see if they might be trending towards a problem, Nature. com now has in Zenoss a single view into the various aspects of the code and infrastructure which make up Nature.com. Zenoss also provides developers access to a dashboard so they can get custom metrics that they are most interested in. By analyzing the performance of their code and web site, developers can look into the metrics of a server and get to the root of a problem, or confirm that a problem exists with an application more quickly.
The Results
After the first full year of having Zenoss fully deployed, Nature.com has increased their web site availability, exceeding their SLAs and improving the customer experience and overall customer satisfaction. By improving the cooperation and production between the operations and development teams, they have decreased response times and allowed developers to see the impact of their changes in real-time instead of waiting weeks before they see it in production. This has provided a test environment for optimizing the performance of their applications, enabling them to identify and diagnose any problemns before going into production. As a result, Nature.com has reduced outages and performance issues that would have otherwise impacted contract renewals and new customer referrals.
"With Zenoss, we have a lot more confidence knowing that our entire infrastructure is being monitored by one device," said Scott McCool, Web Hosting Mnager at Nature.com. "We see problems or alerts much sooner on subsets of the web cluster or staging nodes that we're able to catch before they actually make it to production. We can now identify and prevent any issues before they impact our customers."
Additionally, Nature.com confirmed that the Zenoss community surrounding the open source component has been very responsive and given them them the ability to get simple problems resolved in a timely manner.
"Zenoss has exceeded our expectations," added McCool. "What continues to impress us is the pace of innovation of the product. We're happy with every major release that comes out, along with the ZenPacks released and expansions, whether they're communityor enterprise-based, particularly the drastically improved VMware support we've seen over the past year. There's a comfort knowing Zenoss is keeping up with the industry and with our specific needs."
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