Framework based IT monitoring solutions have far outlasted their welcome. As the cloud-era datacenters continue to throw unprecedented challenges their way, these tools, some fromtwo decades ago are just not aging gracefully. These “solutions” sold by many of the Big 4 Framework vendors (BMC, CA Technologies, HP & IBM) were once monolithic single technology platforms yet are today loosely cobbled disparate products that were picked up through various acquisitions. And while they might share a common name and an umbrella, they often don’t share much else. Increasingly, the IT organizations that have trusted these vendors for a long time, are beginning to look elsewhere. We often hear stories of disbelief and frustration about these products from organizations that have made the switch to Zenoss’ modern IT Operations solution. Here is one that I heard recently from one of our larger customers. Please don’t be too surprised if parts of this story sound very familiar….Oh, and the names have been changed to protect the innovators!
This giant in the financial industry is one of the world’s leaders in banking and payment technologies serving thousands of institutions in over 100 countries. To best serve their customers, they have datacenters spread across the US and Asia. They had over 40 tools in place to manage their resources globally; mostly from a Big 4 vendor, that had been implemented over time and spread across the organization within different silos. As discussed above, these “solutions” offered little or no integration and cross-silo communication through the tools was non-existent. When problems occurred, IT ops professionals jumped from one console to another as they tried to make sense of service disruptions. No holistic view of the environment was available. Root cause analysis was nearly impossible, and finger pointing was rampant. MTTR was long, often exceeding a full day. In addition, the high initial acquisition costs and the ongoing maintenance costs forced them to limit the monitoring to only the most critical resources (less than 10% of what they managed) that supported the mission critical business services.
They knew they needed a change. After an extensive 11 product bake off, they bought in Zenoss, because it was easier and quicker to deploy and had the flexibility to fit within their existing IT ops processes. Almost immediately they had their Central console which was their single source of truth. With its Manager of Manager capabilities Zenoss gathered events from managed resources and also from other monitoring tools. The organization finally had an enterprise view of their entire environment. Leveraging the extensive library of 350+ ZenPacks, (add-ons), the team was able to monitor a wide variety of devices and platforms reducing the total number of tools from 40+ down to 5. And they managed to lower their operational costs so much that their CIO approved 5 additional FTEs with some of the savings!
The net result –
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Single console with consolidated view of the entire organization
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Faster resolution of incidents
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Simplicity through reduction in the number of tools needed. Down from 40+ to 5.
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Cost effectiveness – Lowered operational costs now allows them to monitor all resources for the same price that had allowed them to monitor only 10%
To learn more about this organization and others that are benefitting from the Next generation of IT monitoring please register here to join us for the Zenoss webinar
Webcast: The Next Generation of IT Monitoring is Here (to stay)
Date: Thursday, February 13, 2014
Time: 1:00 pm CST | 2:00 pm EST | 11:00 am PST
If you liked this blog, you might also like the Zenoss white paper Zenoss Service Dynamics: 4 Profiles in Unified Monitoring Success
