Aston University Strengthens Always-on IT Operations with LogicMonitor

Aston University: A Prominent educational institution  supporting a modern, always-on learning environment

Aston University serves more than 21,000 students, with teaching delivered on campus in Birmingham, online, and through partner institutions around the world. Across these models, digital services play a central role in how students learn, access materials, and interact with the university.

Whether students are attending lectures on campus, studying remotely, or accessing courses through international partner hubs, reliable access to systems is essential.

“Students on campus might have a lecture at nine, another at 11, and a third in the afternoon. We have to provide the students with a space where they can go and do their work,” said Trevor Bayliss, technical director of digital services at Aston University. “Having a reliable system for that is a requirement. And people who aren’t on campus need those systems in the cloud 24 hours per day. It adds complications and resilience requirements.” 

Challenge: Fragmented monitoring limited visibility across a hybrid environment

Before implementing LogicMonitor, Aston University relied on a mix of vendor-specific monitoring solutions and open source, “freeware” systems. These approaches provided visibility into individual components but not across the full environment.

Much of the monitoring was focused on on-premises infrastructure, making it difficult to track performance consistently as cloud services became more central to operations.

“It’s difficult to predict problems when you’ve got very siloed information,” said Bayliss. “How do you pull all of that together?”

Why Aston University Chose LogicMonitor

Aston University evaluated multiple monitoring solutions over the course of a year, looking for a platform that could provide unified visibility across its hybrid infrastructure while supporting a phased rollout.

The team selected LogicMonitor because it could:

• Provide a unified view across on-premises and cloud environments
• Support a modular approach, allowing the team to expand monitoring over time
• Deliver consistent visibility across different technologies and services

“We wanted to see everything all on one screen,” said Bayliss. “If loads of things are going red across your systems, you need to know the cause…bringing everything into one system allows everyone to see that problems are affecting more than one area.” 

By consolidating monitoring into a single platform, Aston enabled teams to move beyond isolated views and better understand how issues across infrastructure layers are connected.

Early impact: Faster visibility and more efficient operations

Aston University began seeing value soon after deploying LogicMonitor. The platform provided immediate visibility into key systems and simplified how teams reviewed and responded to alerts.

Key improvements included:

• Faster alert triage, reducing time spent manually checking individual systems
• Better issue correlation across servers, networks, and logs
• Improved reporting on performance and service availability 

“We never had a measure on our performance and metrics for the infrastructure, but with LogicMonitor, we’re able to move easily from the business or technical service down to the components and get very granular if needed. We can chop and change information, create baselines, and say what’s changing—then publish that information to the rest of the university.” — Trevor Bayliss, Technical Director of Digital Services at Aston University

LogicMonitor also became embedded in daily workflows. Teams now use it to review overnight activity, identify trends, and prioritize actions more effectively.

Proactive monitoring helps protect the student experience

One of the most significant benefits has been improved visibility into the university’s student record system, a critical service supporting enrollment, and the broader student lifecycle.

Previously, the system would experience periods of degraded performance without a clear cause. With LogicMonitor, the team now monitors performance across all supporting infrastructure and can detect early warning signs.

“We now have a dashboard that shows the performance of our servers on them; we run it and have it on a screen in the clearing room with the call center team and senior management,” said Bayliss.”As memory creeps up, the team knows to reboot before a performance problem happens. We can predict poor performance before it happens. We’re correcting things ahead of schedule.” 

This proactive approach allows the team to resolve issues before they affect users, helping maintain consistent performance during high-pressure periods.

As a result, students and staff experience more reliable access to essential systems, even during peak demand.

What’s next for Aston University? 

With LogicMonitor embedded in daily operations, Aston University is continuing to expand how it uses the platform.

Future priorities include:

• Extending monitoring across additional cloud-based services and platforms
• Increasing automation to reduce manual intervention in routine tasks
• Exploring how artificial intelligence can support prediction and remediation
• Connecting monitoring data to a broader service catalog for improved visibility

“We’re working on a service catalogue where we’ll link everything in one place,” said Bayliss. “So we can start to say, ‘here’s all of the services you have access to and they’re all green; they’re all online.”