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When you’re running IT for 600+ stores across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Dubai, and China, “complexity” doesn’t quite cover it. Every POS terminal, warehouse server, store router, and mobile device adds to the operational noise—and when something breaks, the ripple effect hits fast.
For Chemist Warehouse, reliable IT operations is about meeting community healthcare needs, staying compliant across regions, and keeping essential pharmacy services online 24/7.
In this recent LogicMonitor webinar, Cutting Through the Noise, Jesse Cardinale, Infrastructure Lead at Chemist Warehouse, joined LogicMonitor’s Caerl Murray to walk through how they tackled alert fatigue, streamlined incident response, and shifted their IT team from reactive to proactive—with the help of Edwin AI.
If you’re dealing with high alert volumes, fragmented monitoring tools, or the growing pressure to “do more with less,” this recap is for you.
Key takeaways
Meet Chemist Warehouse: Retail at Global Scale
Chemist Warehouse is Australia’s largest pharmacy retailer, but it’s also a global operation. With over 600 stores and a rapidly growing presence in New Zealand, Ireland, Dubai, and China, the company’s IT backbone has to support a 24/7 environment. That includes three major data centers, a cloud footprint spanning multiple providers, and an SD-WAN network connecting edge systems across every store and distribution center.
Jesse Cardinale, who leads infrastructure at Chemist Warehouse, summed it up: “We’re responsible for the back end of everything that keeps the business running 24/7. There’s the technology, of course—but it’s the scale, the people, and the processes can make it a bit of a beast.”
That global scale introduces serious complexity. From legacy systems in remote towns to modern cloud workloads supporting ecommerce, Jesse’s team is constantly balancing uptime, cost control, and compliance across vastly different regions. And unlike a typical retailer, Chemist Warehouse carries an added layer of responsibility: pharmaceutical care.
“Yes, you can walk in and grab vitamins or fragrance,” Jesse said. “But I think the major thing that gets overlooked is that we’re a healthcare provider. We need to be online, operational, and ready to provide pharmaceutical goods to our community.”
This is all to say that IT performance is mission-critical, not a back office function.
The ITOps Challenge: Noise, Complexity, Compliance
Before partnering with LogicMonitor, Chemist Warehouse faced a familiar, but painful, reality: fragmented monitoring tools, endless alerts, and no clear view of what really mattered.
“We had to rely on multiple platforms to get the visibility we needed. What we ended up with was one tool that was specialized in getting network monitoring, another for servers, another for cloud workloads, and so on,” Jesse explained. “Each of these tools had its own learning curve and required dedicated expertise, which made it hard to manage at scale. And the view into our environment was completely siloed. It was difficult to correlate events across the stack.”
That fragmented setup led to alert fatigue. Every system was generating noise. Teams were overloaded, trying to parse out what was real, what was urgent, and what was just background chatter. Without correlation or context, IT spent more time firefighting than preventing issues.
And with thousands of endpoints—POS systems, mobile devices, local servers, and more—spread across urban and remote locations, even a small issue could ripple across the business. A power outage in a single store could trigger ten separate alerts, resulting in duplicate tickets, delayed resolution, and frustrated teams.
The lack of visibility didn’t stay behind the scenes; it disrupted customer experience in real time: “A delay at checkout. A failed online order. A warehouse bottleneck. All of those can impact someone’s ability to get their medication,” Jesse said. “We can’t afford that.”
Compliance made it even more critical. Different countries meant different regulations, and stores needed to stay online and accessible no matter the circumstances. Whether responding to a storm in Australia or managing pharmaceutical access in Dubai, Chemist Warehouse had to deliver seamless, uninterrupted service. No excuses.
Enter LogicMonitor: One Platform to See It All
To get ahead of the complexity, Chemist Warehouse needed a platform that could centralize their view, eliminate blind spots, and scale with their business. LogicMonitor delivered that foundation.
“We moved to LogicMonitor because it gave us a unified, scalable observability platform,” Jesse said. “Instead of manually defining thresholds or trying to stitch everything together, we could monitor everything and let the AI tell us what actually mattered.”
With LogicMonitor, the Chemist Warehouse infrastructure team consolidated visibility across their global environment—from cloud workloads to edge compute, from distribution centers to retail stores. Integrating with ServiceNow allowed for streamlined incident routing, while dashboards gave teams immediate clarity into system health.
Still, even with this unified observability, the alert volume remained high. Everything was visible, but not everything was actionable.
That’s when the team turned to Edwin AI, LogicMonitor’s AI agent for ITOps.
“It was either spend a lot of man hours trying to further tune the environment, optimize it, work with your teams, or we could get AI to do the work,” Jesse said. “We chose AI.”
Once deployed, the numbers told the story:
- 88% reduction in alert volume
- 22% fewer incidents within the first month
- Faster correlation, smarter prioritization, and clearer root cause analysis
Instead of ten noisy alerts, Edwin AI can deliver a single, correlated incident—saving hours of manual triage and helping the right teams respond faster. A power outage at a store, for example, no longer triggered a flood of device-specific alerts. Edwin identified the root cause and pushed a single, actionable incident to ServiceNow.
“The results were dramatic… An 88% reduction in alert volume after enabling Edwin AI. To us, that’s not just a number; it’s a daily quality-of-life improvement for my team,” said Jesse.
How Edwin AI Transformed ITOps
With fewer distractions and clearer insights provided by Edwin AI, Jesse’s team was able to shift from reactive incident response to proactive service improvement. Instead of chasing false positives and duplicative tickets, engineers could focus on building new solutions, rolling out infrastructure upgrades, and delivering business value.
“Before Edwin, we needed more people spending more time looking at alerts, just to figure out what was real,” said Jesse. ”Now, we have more time and more people focused on the future.”
That shift enabled faster innovation and more dynamic support for the business. Changes that used to take weeks could now be delivered quickly and with less risk. Incident resolution times dropped, because each ticket came with context, correlation, and actionable insight.
Edwin AI’s integration with ServiceNow played a key role in that improvement. Edwin AI acted as the front door, correlating and filtering alerts before pushing them into Chemist Warehouse’s ITSM workflows. The setup process was simple, requiring just one collaborative session between LogicMonitor and Chemist Warehouse’s internal teams.
“It wasn’t a tool drop. LogicMonitor really partnered with us,” Jesse noted. “Edwin AI made our workflows smarter.”
Fewer disruptions meant more consistent store operations, better customer experiences, and stronger business continuity across regions. The team was also able to support more infrastructure, at greater scale, without increasing headcount.
“We’re actually monitoring more than ever,” Jesse said. “But thanks to Edwin AI, the incident volume went down.”
Lessons from the Field: Advice from Chemist Warehouse
If there’s one thing Jesse Cardinale emphasized, it’s that observability isn’t something you just “turn on”. It’s a practice that needs attention, iteration, and ownership.
“Don’t treat monitoring like a set-and-forget solution,” he said. “It needs to evolve with your business, just like any other critical platform.”
One of the most impactful decisions Chemist Warehouse made was to dedicate a single engineer to own the monitoring and alerting stack. That person became the internal subject matter expert on LogicMonitor and Edwin AI, working closely with LogicMonitor’s team to fine-tune dashboards, enrich data, and ensure alerts had the right context.
Instead of spending time writing manual thresholds or tuning every alert rule, that engineer focused on feeding Edwin the data it needed to succeed:
- Tagging infrastructure accurately
- Connecting incident resolution notes
- Integrating change data from ServiceNow
This shift, from rules-based monitoring to intelligence-driven signal detection, paid dividends in productivity and clarity.
“The biggest thing that I’ve seen with Edwin AI is that it doesn’t replace our engineers. It complements them. It enables them,” Jesse said. “It gives them the space to think, to solve problems with context and creativity.”
When paired with strong observability practices and intentional data hygiene, AI becomes a force multiplier for your team.
What’s Next for Chemist Warehouse
For Chemist Warehouse, the journey with Edwin AI is far from over. The results so far have been impressive, but Jesse and his team see even more potential in continuing to enrich and evolve their agentic AIOps strategy.
The next phase is deeper data integration. The team is working on feeding Edwin AI even more contextual inputs—like incident resolution notes and change data from ServiceNow—to improve the accuracy of root cause suggestions and predictive insights.
They’re also investing in better tagging and metadata hygiene, ensuring that Edwin understands the relationships and criticality of different systems across their hybrid environment.
“Good data in, good data out,” Jesse emphasized. “The more we help Edwin understand our ecosystem, the smarter it gets.”
But through it all, Jesse remains clear-eyed about the role AI should play in IT operations. It’s not magic—and it’s not meant to replace skilled engineers.
That philosophy shapes how Chemist Warehouse continues to scale its infrastructure: by building a symbiotic relationship between people and AI, where each complements the other.
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