The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has deployed an end-to-end application monitoring solution across its production, test and disaster recovery data centres.
UTS , which has about 24,000 full-time students, runs two data centres — one for production and one for testing and disaster recovery — and supports hundreds of applications in student computer labs across the university as well as business applications such as CRM, email and databases to support university administration.
The data centres house several diverse platforms and systems in both physical and virtual environments.
The university went with the CA Technologies-owned Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) for automatic alerts. It enables the IT team address issues before users become aware of a problem, helping ensure availability and uptime.
Prior to the deployment, the university’s IT team used several point monitoring solutions, but had no end-to-end view of the user experience. The Nimsoft solution helps unified monitoring capabilities, allowing the IT team to monitor 10-12 systems on a single dashboard.
“With NMS, we’re aware of problems before they affect users, and we can send out a message to say they are already addressing it,” the UTS manager of application services, Kieran McPherson, said. “The solution is easy to use and adapts quickly to new situations, so if we find something is occurring and we don’t already have an alert, we can quickly create one to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again. NMS lets us monitor a number of different platforms and applications with a single solution, reducing the complexity of our monitoring approach. Also, because NMS is browser-based, we can make the dashboards open to other departments, increasing transparency and providing more visibility into the health of their applications.”
NMS generates reports on critical systems and applications, and dashboards provide an overall snapshot of performance measures and alerts.
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