A case study
Founded in 1954, Cross Company is a 100 percent employee-owned engineering and automation services company. Its culture is built on the foundation of honesty, integrity, trust, mutual respect, servant leadership, and the highest standards of ethical business conduct. As a company of 720 employees in 21 locations around the US, CrossCo has two primary sites that each run a pair of beefy ESX hosts. All servers are virtualized, from Windows Server 2012 R2 up through 2019.
The challenges faced by Cross Company were high downtime and huge cost of operating expenses. The company previously used Solar Winds to handle these issues, but the solution was expensive, slow, and no one had a good handle on how to use it. It was mostly ignored, and outages were missed. Prior to that, CrossCo used WhatsUp Gold, but its web interface was too slow to use.
Stating cost, functionalities, and usability as the primary ben efits of choosing OpManager, CrossCo uses OpManager daily for its network monitoring needs. OpManager's easy installation and setup, along with its user-friendly UI and custom monitor creation, make network monitoring easy for CrossCo. Server performance monitors, VMWare/HyperV/Xen monitors, service monitors, and storage capacity monitors have been set up by CrossCo in the OpManager UI for IT monitoring. With OpManager, CrossCo saves $1,500 on cost of maintenance per year.
Availability is a critical metric that CrossCo's IT teams closely monitor. "OpManager was easy to set up, and is easy to administer. I also like using the scheduled maintenance window for the monthly patch and reboots we do on the servers to reduce inbox clutter. We have OpManager's push notifications and email alerts sent to members of our server and infrastructure teams whenever a threshold is exceeded.
For Windows servers, instead of relying on ping alerts, which can continue to respond even when a server is unresponsive, we monitor port 3389 for remote desktop services. I haven't seen a crashed server that still responded to queries on that port. Scheduled, automated maintenance for monthly updates and reboots prevents me from having to remember to go in and stop and start services to prevent our inboxes from blowing up," said Greg Widener, IT support supervisor from CrossCo.
ManageEngine OpManager is a network management platform that helps enterprises, service providers and SMEs manage their data centers and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost effectively. Automated workflow s, intelligent alerting engines, configurable discovery rules, and extendable templates enable IT teams to set up a 24/7 monitoring system within hours of installation. Do-it-yourself add-ons extend the scope of management to include network change and configuration management, IP address management, as well as monitoring of networks, applications, databases, and virtualization. For more information about OpManager, visit manageengine.com/opmanager.