Mercy Medical Center Success Story
Mercy Keeps Systems Alive With Zenoss
Mercy Medical Center experienced explosive growth over the past five years and it tripled its investment in technology. Mercy IT had to scale to support over 200 unique applications running on approximately 200 servers with new technology solutions such as storage and bandwidth intensive digital x-ray solutions as well as transaction intensive electronic health records. Mercy used a manual process to validate that the systems were running properly by checking log files and monitoring disparate applications for performance metrics. This was a process that consumed a significant amount of resources from the Mercy IT team.
As internal demand for expensive healthcare solutions had been increasing, the IT department was asked to cut costs and consolidate its operations. Mercy IT had to consolidate two data centers while struggling to support the new technology implementations.
"With so many things happening at once, we (Mercy IT) had a hard time keeping up," said Jim Stalder, CIO at Mercy. "As a result, our enterprise monitoring was somewhat neglected and we soon found ourselves in a reactive mode." Stalder added, "When doctors and nurses started calling the helpdesk from the bed side and telling us that applications were not working, we knew we had a problem."
At first, Mercy IT looked at the traditional, legacy players in the enterprise management space. After a few months of review and site visits with existing customers, Mercy realized how resource intensive some of the traditional solutions had become. The high cost of ownership for traditional vendors' solutions was also a major deterrent, and Stalder said, "Frankly, we didn't have the resources we thought would be required to take full advantage of the proprietary solutions. They were just more complex than we wanted, and full of features that we didn't really need."
The Solution
Mercy selected Zenoss to monitor the health and performance of its heterogeneous IT environment as it enabled the IT organization to scale with the growth of the business and minimized investment costs.
Zenoss was deployed within a few hours and helped Mercy automatically discover and populate the Configuration Management Database (CMBD) including networks, servers, software and applications. Zenoss Enterprise was used to monitor both Windows and Linux environments without the need to deploy agents which saved time and cost for the IT team.
Mercy log files are now consolidated into one location where administrators can review and troubleshoot. Previously, Mercy had to manually go to each machine and review log files. "I use the Zenoss dashboard to view the performance of the systems that I support. With its web-based interface, I can easily see what is occurring in my environment and quickly drill down to event log history, performance graphs and trending analysis," said Ryan Handley, system administrator at Mercy. "The way that Zenoss displays information is also a real time saver; I spend less time logging into systems and I can do most of my troubleshooting using the data provided. I work proactively using Zenoss, and I am able to find smaller problems before they become bigger ones. Above all, I love the flexibility and stability Zenoss has given me. Zenoss allows me personally to be more efficient and effective."
The Results
Mercy realized the advantage of Zenoss within a few hours as performance issues were discovered and proactive actions helped avert production failures. "Zenoss provided us an affordable entry point, using the resources we already had," said Stalder. "It only took about six weeks to get everything up and running where we were truly benefiting from it. We could never have done that with another solution." Prior to deploying Zenoss, Mercy had experienced frequent production failures that caused downtime. Now with Zenoss, Mercy IT has several different people running the Zenoss dashboard at the same time while they receive real time alerts. Mercy Help Desk acts as the front line support and they can monitor for important information about the health of various systems if/when users call with problems, which frees up the IT team to proactively work to avoid costly production failures.
About Mercy Medical Center
Mercy Medical Center is a full-service medical center delivering a comprehensive range of health services including internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, urology, pediatrics, gastroenterology, cardiology, minimally invasive and cosmetic surgery, ophthalmology, rehabilitative care and emergency medicine.
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