Challenge
CAE Technology Services designs and delivers IT infrastructure solutions to organisations across the UK and beyond. CAE works closely with its technology partners to develop the right solutions to meet customers’ needs.
With infrastructure management becoming an increasingly important and complex side of the business, CAE decided to review its monitoring platform. “Our previous solution offered plenty of functionality, but was complex to use. Managing it was time-consuming and required in-depth technical capabilities,” says David Azzopardi, IT Operations Manager at CAE. “This drove up the cost of CAE’s service delivery and tied up valuable resources in delivering managed monitoring.”
As the renewal for their previous monitoring solution came closer, David realised it was important to evaluate alternatives. “As we looked at other solutions in the market, LogicMonitor came out on top for all sorts of reasons, including its stability and ease of deployment and configuration,” says David. LogicMonitor’s stability stems largely from the fact that it is SaaS-based. “That means zero downtime during upgrades, which is a huge advantage. But its range of integrations with almost all of the enterprise infrastructure technology stack was also impressive. Added features like NetFlow traffic monitoring in one single, clutter-free user interface made LogicMonitor stand out,” he says.
LogicMonitor is helping us work smarter with our customers in a proactive, strategic way. We spend less time managing our customer environments and can solve problems more quickly. This leads to first-rate service levels, which is what organisations should be able to expect when they take a managed service.
David Azzopardi IT Operations Manager, CAE
Solution
Once CAE made the decision to go with LogicMonitor, the team had to move fast, as the previous monitoring solution was due to be switched off in four weeks. “The LogicMonitor team absolutely nailed it,” says David. “Working together, we completed deployment to all 3,000 or so customer devices within a very tight timeframe.”
Deployment incorporated a customised integration of LogicMonitor with Autotask, the ticketing system used by CAE. LogicMonitor worked with a development partner to extend the standard integration to Autotask with the extra features CAE wanted, including automation of ticket updates, status changes and problem ticket creation for recurring issues.
Even with a solution that’s as stable and intuitive as LogicMonitor, customers still sometimes need to raise issues or queries. “LogicMonitor’s support team is very efficient — as well as quick to respond. I love the chat facility as I get an instant response to queries. Their first-line resources are so skilled, they can answer most things on the spot,” says David. “The LogicMonitor support team is like an extension of our own service desk and is always available instantly.”
LogicMonitor provides insight to our service desk team and allows us to identify the root cause of a problem in just a couple of minutes, not hours.
David Azzopardi IT Operations Manager, CAE
Benefits
Since the initial rollout, CAE has added hundreds of additional customer devices to its LogicMonitor platform. “LogicMonitor’s customer onboarding process is so smooth and quick, we have been able to reduce our customer onboarding time by up to 50% and no longer need highly skilled engineers to do onboarding. The service desk team has been able to take on this responsibility without needing extensive training,” says David. “That’s freed up valuable technical resources to focus on other tasks.”
The ease and speed of the process is due largely to automation within LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor’s platform automatically discovers new devices and applies a range of appropriate monitoring metrics to each one. “LogicMonitor’s automation saves time and reduces the risk of error,” says David. “But what’s great is that we still have control to modify the monitoring criteria at any level within the system if we need to — another advantage of LogicMonitor over other solutions I’ve used.”
The easy-to-use LogicMonitor portal provides CAE’s service desk and NOC with alerts about customers’ server and networking devices respectively, enabling them to take rapid action to resolve any issues. Beyond efficiency gains, however, LogicMonitor is also helping CAE to evolve its service to be more proactive. “Simply responding to alerts is a behaviour that was led by our previous monitoring solutions,” says David. “Our aim now is to identify and resolve a situation before it becomes an alert.”
To that end, the service desk and NOC teams use the metrics, graphs and other information on the LogicMonitor portal to learn more about the environments they manage. They then create dashboards that support a troubleshooting approach to managed services provision. As a result, CAE can now distinguish anomalies from patterns in a customer’s infrastructure, and can fix them before they become issues that affect users. “LogicMonitor provides insight to our service desk team and allows us to identify the root cause of a problem in just a couple of minutes, not hours,” says David.
“LogicMonitor is helping us work smarter with our customers in a proactive, strategic way. We spend less time managing our customer environments and can solve problems more quickly. This leads to first-rate service levels, which is what organisations should be able to expect when they take a managed service,” says David. “As well as being better for our customers and enhancing our reputation, it’s a more fulfilling way for our service desk and NOC teams to work.”