By prioritizing unified observability in their digital transformation strategy, Bandwidth was able to leverage automation to increase operational efficiency and decrease downtime.
Challenge
Bandwidth is a cloud communications software company that helps enterprises like Google, Microsoft, Uber and Zoom connect people around the world with a global network and APIs for voice, messaging and emergency services.
The challenges of scaling such a large environment illustrated the importance of visibility and immediate alerting. Bandwidth had grown to the point that its network monitoring tools couldn’t deliver the level of insights the team needed to support growth. Prior to using LogicMonitor, the team was spending about 31% of their time on extra work and configuration monitoring, and not enough time as needed on development, leading to inefficiency and opportunity costs.
Bandwidth began to reevaluate its monitoring strategy and conduct a search for an observability platform that would provide the insights and forecasting needed to scale efficiently and proactively solve problems.
We were getting to the point where our network was getting so big that our incumbent platform just couldn’t handle it. We needed a replacement – something that could do more for us with less effort
Austin Culbertson, NetOps Observability Manager Bandwidth
Solution
Bandwidth evaluated unified observability platforms that aligned with their future vision and goals for their growing organization. Their key requirements were extensibility, automation, and accessibility to ensure operational efficiency
After selecting LogicMonitor and leveraging multi-instance active discovery, Bandwidth was able to migrate from their previous platform, which was overloaded with complicated integrations, in only six months with a single person running support. LogicMonitor’s built-in support and detailed documentation were also instrumental in their migration, helping them to quickly build the customized, automated concepts they needed to increase innovative development and uptime.
Now, Culbertson and his team are able to focus on extending and expanding their monitoring strategy through automation and accessibility. By leveraging LogicMonitor’s robust unified observability platform, Bandwidth is able to automate processes that used to be cumbersome and time-consuming. Features like active discovery provides the ability to instantly see what they need and implement automation concepts. By using property hierarchy and AppliesTo functions, they are also able to lay the proper framework and accurately expose data automatically within their dashboard tokens and unlock time-saving automations.
Property hierarchy was the cornerstone of automation for us. It allowed us to create the teams and device specific properties for the organization. Whenever we provision a device, it gets everything it needs. Using property sources, AppliesTo functions, and multi-instance active discovery, it is quite literally fire and forget it.
Austin Culbertson, NetOps Observability Manager Bandwidth
Culbertson and team spent valuable time solving problems related to the inefficient manual administration and management of their previous monitoring platform. Now with LogicMonitor, their workload has reduced to 15% of interrupt work, which now consists mainly of user education and support engagement, and only 5% on maintenance tasks like capacity planning. With a robust observability platform the team can now spend the majority of their time focusing on innovative development to move their business forward.
Because LogicMonitor was able to solve both the scalability issue and the timeliness, it was also a big deal that we could automate a lot of the customization that we needed
Nathan Custis, Monitoring Engineer Bandwidth
Benefits
The benefits of a unified observability platform were demonstrated right away. After deploying LogicMonitor, the team had access to instant insights of their environments. As a result, time spent on development increased to 80%.
By operating as a center of excellence for Bandwidth, Culbertson’s NetOps Observability team has been able to demonstrate not only their own value internally, but their value and alignment to their customers.
Getting as much information as possible under one roof with a single platform saves the company money. Unified observability has helped our business grow faster by shortening our development cycle significantly, the development cycle that previously might have taken a week or two, is now only ten minutes.
Nathan Custis, Monitoring Engineer Bandwidth
Looking to the future, Bandwidth is concentrating on integrating observability globally. The NetOps Observability team has seen the value of LogicMonitor and is working to standardize monitoring platforms across the globe to LogicMonitor.
Bandwidth is also looking to operationalize logs with LM Logs, unlock more self service options and continue to focus on their overall monitoring strategy with the development of features, optimizations, solutioning and more.
To work towards unified observability for a growing environment you need to reduce manual configuration time and increase efficiency through automation and accessibility
Austin Culbertson, NetOps Observability Manager Bandwidth