Case Study – Nimsoft Monitoring Solution

Managed Service Provider leverages unified monitoring to help ensure high availability of managed services and critical systems

Background

Thomas Duryea Consulting designs, plans, implements and manages innovative, world class IT infrastructure solutions. A trusted, privately owned supplier to companies across the Asia Pacific region, the company delivers secure, agile IT solutions to help customers increase revenue, reduce costs and reinvest in innovation. Thomas Duryea’s clear focus and technical excellence has enabled the company to grow dramatically, from 15 people three years ago to 90 employees today.

“Our goal was to create an IT consulting firm for the mid-market space, and we’ve been recognised as one of Australia’s fastest growing companies”, said Andrew Thomas, CEO of Thomas Duryea Consulting.

“Today we provide a services view of the IT world with datacenter solutions that include data management, consulting, security consulting and archiving, as well as the managed service infrastructure, while maintaining a strong focus on building relationships.”

With a broad service offering and such rapid growth in its customer base, Thomas Duryea needs efficient solutions that are easy to manage and use, cost-effective and not overly complex. However, to remain competitive, the solutions need to offer rich functionality and support new technologies like virtualization and cloud computing. To this end, Thomas Duryea began to migrate from a traditional product plus services model to a cloud services model.

“Our managed services business provides ongoing services to our customers. Our consulting arm looks at the larger picture, that is, how can we build a cloud structure or IT strategy for our clients and support them on an ongoing bases to help them reach their specific goals”, said Thomas.

Challenges

Thomas Duryea wanted to position its managed services as an add-on to its existing line of business and productise its new services offerings. The team realised it needed to incorporate a remote monitoring solution as part of these new service offerings.

To provide value, the monitoring solution needed to integrate with existing go to market solutions, specifically VMware virtualization technology, EMC/NetApp storage solutions and MS Exchange systems already deployed in customer IT infrastructures. Thomas Duryea was looking for a solution to simplify remote monitoring of multiple environments, provide visibility into customer environments, enable effective troubleshooting, performance analysis and reporting.

“At the time we were using a combination of tools—mostly open source tools that provided no depth or breath”, said Thomas.

“There was no way to evaluate the customer’s experience with the service we provided. Being able to quickly gauge the performance of our services and then act on potential issues in a proactive way was essential to providing the high availability that would differentiate our cloud offering from competitors.”

Solution

Thomas Duryea’s IT team deployed the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) to approximately 15 of its clients as an integrated part of its Minder Support Services Suite. Built on the Nimsoft Unified Monitoring™ architecture, NMS offers a cost-effective way to monitor current and emerging computing environments, including private and public clouds.

The platform offers integrated event, performance and availability, end-user response, service level, and business service monitoring—as well as bi-directional data integration into related applications such as CMDB and service desk. Through NMS, alerts on events happening within customer environments are fed into Thomas Duryea’s ConnectWise system so staff can closely monitor the health of managed systems and the performance of services at all times.

“NMS enables us to provide mission critical services, such as MS Exchange, to companies that don’t have the skills in-house to support that technology”, said Thomas, “We use NMS to proactively monitor the systems and perform preventative maintenance, providing high availability on the systems our clients rely on.”

The Nimsoft product line features a lean, secure, modular architecture as well as deployment flexibility and broad monitoring coverage—characteristics that make the product ideally suited to Managed Service Providers’ infrastructures and business models. NMS dashboard functionality integrates into the service management systems to provide visibility into the status and health of remotely managed services.

NMS dashboards are Web enabled for remote accessibility and have access control features to help ensure sensitive network information is only viewable by authorised users. Similarly, Thomas Duryea’s clients interact with Service Delivery Portals that provide complete and easy-to-analyse views into the real-time status of IT and critical business services.

“The dashboards provide a high degree of visibility into the systems”, said Thomas. “If anything is wrong, we receive alerts on the dashboards and can take proactive action, before there’s a real problem. We can also use the dashboards to analyze and report on capacity management and other metrics, giving our clients peace of mind.”

Thomas Duryea is using Nimsoft open APIs to build automation around deployment and integration with other tools and systems. Additionally, the team is using the synthetic monitoring capabilities of the system, which enable simulation of a user sequence, such as logging into the ERP system or running a report, and obtain exact performance measurements.

Before selecting Nimsoft, Thomas Duryea Consulting evaluated multiple competing solutions, including IBM Tivoli Monitoring and HP OpenView. Unlike these solutions, Nimsoft requires minimal bandwidth, minimizes complexity and simplifies deployment. Nimsoft also supports Thomas Duryea’s goal to provide servicelevel metrics to customers through SLA monitoring.

“We chose Nimsoft for several reasons, including its support for multiple vendors and platforms and its ability to monitor both physical and virtual machines”, said Thomas. “Nimsoft has a deep understanding of the managed services market, and NMS is designed with a feature set that fits our unique business requirements and revenue model. The solution was easy to get up and running quickly, compared to other offerings, and it integrated well with our cloud services. In fact, we were able to set up NMS with our existing client connections, eliminating the need for a dedicated WAN link”, said Thomas. “This simplified and sped up deployment significantly.”

A critical feature for Thomas Duryea is the solution’s ability to monitor VMware virtualized environments. “VMware is one of our key partners, so support for virtualization technology was a big factor in our decision”, said Thomas. “When we evaluated monitoring tools, no other solution matched NMS in this area. With NMS, we can monitor the whole stack at a customer’s site— from virtual machines to network elements—all in a single screen.”

Results

By delivering 24×7 monitoring in real time, NMS helps Thomas Duryea Consulting proactively address and resolve issues, increasing network stability. Ultimately, clients benefit from stable IT environments, improving satisfaction and boosting user productivity.

“Many of our clients had no pre-existing monitoring solution, so it’s really making a big difference”, said Thomas. “With NMS in place, we can keep our clients’ environments at an optimum level and spot problems before they cause an incident or outage. At the same time, clients experience much less downtime and increased IT availability, so they can worry less about IT and focus more on core business activities.”

Through NMS, Thomas Duryea can provide clients with an overview of their environment using the intuitive Service Delivery Portal, including availability within the various managed systems, all in a single interface. The Thomas Duryea team benefits as well, because they can efficiently and remotely monitor numerous client environments with a single dashboard. These capabilities serve as an entry point for adoption of cloud services, which, according to Thomas will be a major focus for Thomas Duryea moving forward.

“We need to educate our clients and paint the picture of a utilitybased computing ‘nirvana’”, said Thomas. “Our goal is to become our clients cloud advisor and offer a roadmap to assist them on their journey to the cloud. With NMS, we’re positioned well to offer the cloud as a viable alternative to traditional computing models, and to position ourselves as a “best-of-breed” cloud services provider.”