A pillar of the December holiday season, the Elves at Santa’s Workshop work tirelessly year-round to provide a quality Christmas experience for children around the world who have made it to the Nice list. To ensure all children on the Nice list receive their Christmas packages in a timely manner, the IT team at Santa’s Workshop turned to LogicMonitor to monitor Santa’s annual journey around the globe in real-time.
Challenge:
During the 2020 Christmas run, outages caused an estimated 53,000+ children on Santa’s Naughty list to receive actual Christmas gifts instead of coal. “It was pandemonium,” Holly Sugar-Shoes, IT Operations Manager at Santa’s Workshop explained. “Not only were [kids] on the Nice list not receiving the gifts they asked Santa for, we estimated that over 600 Naughty children received Playstation 5 consoles. A rare failure we could not afford to repeat in 2021.”
Additionally, for years, Santa Claus, owner and founder of Santa’s Workshop, has used a manual process to check his list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Even when his list was populated and checked twice, the elf-errors were still not perfect, causing miscalculations, and wasting hundreds of hours that should have been spent making toys.
Solution:
Santa’s Workshop onboarded LogicMonitor in October 2021 to monitor all aspects of Santa’s Dec. 24-25 sleigh ride. Claus personally used LogicMonitor’s Log Analysis platform to automate and find anomalies for his naughty and nice list, saving him 820 estimated hours of manually checking his list twice. LM’s anomaly detection system sent alerts when children on the Naughty list were expected to receive gifts other than coal, pre-empting issues before any gifts made it down the chimney. And with LM Logs unlimited retention, Claus and his team have the ability to rehydrate their log data instantly to perform data and behavioral analysis. Allowing them to better optimize and categorize their naughty and nice lists with context and correlation. No fancy querying skills necessary – the elves love spending their time making toys instead of learning proprietary and complex querying languages.
Thanks to LogicMonitor’s Professional Services, implementation was completed in less than 48 hours, and a custom dashboard was created specifically for the Workshop.
Features of the Dashboard:
Uses a topology source to map the connections between Santa, his sleigh, the reindeer and highlights any equipment errors in the sleigh or reins.
Tracks the cumulative total presents delivered
Tracks North Pole notices
Displays weather at the North Pole
Displays Santa’s Current location on a Google Map
Thanks to what Claus referred to as, “The spirit of giving,” Santa’s Workshop has provided Nice List-allocated children who have LogicMonitor with the opportunity to track the distance between Santa’s current location and user-provided coordinates, available as a standalone dashboard separate from Santa’s Workshop. Alerts are triggered when Santa is within 1000, 500, and 300 km.
“Puddin Angel-Pants, Reindeer Procurement Team Manager mentioned that he needed a status widget for all reindeer that they could put up on the big screen in the stables. This would allow them to quickly respond to any issues that might come up,” Sugar-Shoes said. “Of course he didn’t say anything until after Professional Services was done with the dashboard. However, we just added a NOC widget to the dashboard showing the alert status of all the reindeer. He dropped it on the big screen and they had everything they needed.”
LogicMonitor’s extensibility reaches far beyond monitoring Santa’s sleigh. “With LogicMonitor, we went beyond monitoring just Santa’s sleigh ride, and now monitor all of our hybrid cloud and on-prem infrastructure as well,” Sugar-Shoes said. “Thanks to LM’s out of the box AIOps capabilities, we’re alerted of potential downtime before they even happen, which has significantly improved our SLAs. This 2021 Christmas, we finally feel prepared for anything, even if AWS has an outage.”
To learn more about everything LogicMonitor can help you monitor and beyond, check out the platform demo or sign up for a free trial, and make your holiday a little more merry and bright.