Rackspace Success Story
Rackspace Keeps Pace with Evolving Customer Needs
The Challenge
Ensuring the uptime of over 13,000 Cisco network devices spread across its extensive customer base, Rackspace Hosting recognized that it had outgrown its network management tools. The company required a new network monitoring solution that had deeper out-ofthe-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. "Because network monitoring is so critical to our business, we took the time to assess the different solutions in great detail," said Marty Meyers, global network operations manager at Rackspace. "What we discovered was that the proprietary solutions lacked the flexibility we required; we couldn't get them to fit our unique environment."
The Solution
Rackspace selected Zenoss for its ease of use, scalability and ability to fit Rackspace's environment and meet specific customer needs. "Zenoss was extremely configurable out of the box, and in the few cases we needed to go the extra mile, we cracked open the code and developed very specific functionality," continued Meyers. "Not only does Zenoss fit our internal environment perfectly, we can now offer services to our customers that our competitors cannot."
Rackspace uses auto-discovery in Zenoss to detect new network devices and alert users of their existence. The Rackspace team then quickly assigns these devices to pre-defined device families based on templates. The new devices automatically inherit the monitoring parameters associated with their respective device type family. As a result, Rackspace is able to set up new network devices much faster than before.
The Results
Zenoss's centralized monitor dashboard and alerts have driven further efficiencies. The Rackspace team now has a comprehensive bird's eye view of their entire network infrastructure. They use SNMP polling to detect issues and are notified via event alerting on the console. The team can then easily track the cause through the console to resolve potential issues before customers are impacted. Rackspace has also implemented synthetic transactions and threshold-based monitoring in Zenoss to proactively detect potential issues and resolve them before customers are impacted.
"With Zenoss, we're able to detect potential issues more quickly and resolve them before customers experience problems," said Meyers. "It's all about minimizing performance degradation and downtime, and Zenoss does a great job of that. The solution works exactly the way we need it to work."
About Rackspace
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing and is ranked #43 on FORTUNE Magazine's 100 Best Companies to work for in the United States. The company provides its customers Fanatical Support ® in their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit http://www.rackspace.com.
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