How The Building Company uses OpManager to proactively monitor and eliminate network outages.
The Building Company sources, distributes, wholesales, and retails building materials. Its brands serve the full spectrum of the construction industry including the residential, commercial, and industrial markets. The retail activities of the company expand to 124 outlets throughout Southern Africa. Its branches are located in major centers in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and Swaziland, and are managed as either corporate, joint venture, or franchise stores.
Before implementing OpManager, The Building Company faced severe network downtime, resulting in a loss of productivity and user satisfaction. It was also taking too much time to troubleshoot network issues. The network admins found it hard to diagnose and resolve issues efficiently. As Fritz, a member of the IT team, stated:
"We had no monitoring system and relied on users to report down devices or network outages. We then would report this to the vendor."
The company was in need of a solution that proactively monitored its business-critical network services.
The Building Company found an optimal network management solution in OpManager. Following the easy installation and setup, it configured multiple monitors for its routers, switches, and servers. This enabled the company to keep track of its network performance. In addition to real-time monitoring, the dashboard customization provides the desired performance metrics at a glance.
One of the key solutions that OpManager provides is device availability monitoring. The network team is instantly alerted whenever a device is down, which enables them to promptly respond and bring the device back up. Also, monitoring key performance metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk utilization helps The Building Company gain critical insights on its network. Fritz says:
"We have a holistic view of the network and can monitor everything without vendor assistance. We have reported issues before users are made aware. The product offers great proactive monitoring and high SLA monitoring, which is vital for our business."
The company set up threshold monitors for each of its critical services. With the help of workflows, files, folders, and URLs are also monitored. Whenever a set threshold is violated, a ticket is logged in ServiceDesk Plus without any human intervention. This level of proactive monitoring from OpManager ensures seamless network performance.
Apart from ManageEngine OpManager, The Building Company also uses ServiceDesk Plus for help desk and asset management, ADManager Plus for Active Directory management and reporting, Desktop Central for endpoint management, and Analytics Plus for visualizing and analyzing data.
With the ServiceDesk Plus integration, ticket logging became much easier. Whenever a threshold violation alert is triggered, a ticket is logged in ServiceDesk Plus automatically along with vital details about the issue. This automation helps to reduce the mean time to resolve (MTTR) by a great extent. Plus, total visibility on the root cause of the issue helps with preventing it from recurring.
"When I log a ticket [in ServiceDesk Plus] using OpManager, all fields are filled in without human error, and I can include Ping and Trace Route results. This ensures that the ticket is logged correctly and with all relevant details," says Fritz.
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 workflows, 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
