Challenge
GCISD is located in Grapevine, Texas, and consists of around 14,000 students, and 1,800 staff. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, they were a technology-forward district, with a 1:1 device policy that provided students with iPads, Chromebooks, or Windows devices. This program, along with a BYOD (bring your own device) policy, means that an average of 40,000 devices are online in the district at any given time.
The challenges of so many devices, combined with the importance of ensuring seamless technology-powered learning for all students, led GCISD to search for a highly secure observability platform that would give them best-in-class network monitoring, support all the technology systems they used every day, and offer a robust alerting and forecasting systems to solve problems before they impacted teachers and students.
“As we moved through the pandemic and the complete school system went online we realized that even a second of downtime or service interruption would severely impact instruction,” explained Kyle Berger, Chief Technology Officer at Gravepine-Colleyville, ISD. “Having a tool like LogicMonitor is so important to ensure that our technology is supporting our students and staff 24/7.”
Prior to using LogicMonitor, the district used several tools for monitoring networks and pulling logs. The result was that support staff had to manage several tools and platforms daily. When problems occurred, finding the cause was time-consuming.
GCISD knew they needed to find an observability platform that would allow them to monitor every aspect of their infrastructure in one place. This was both because of the significant impact IT problems could have on student education, and because of their relatively small staff to support the entire district.
Finding a highly secure platform was also a key requirement. Security requirements at every level were met by LogicMonitor, from ensuring that all devices were granted the correct network access, to securely housing data within the US and being able to monitor devices without having to provide authorization information.
With LogicMonitor, our network and engineering teams get a single pane of glass that lets them quickly find problems and resolve them.
Kyle Berger Chief Technology Officer, Gravepine-Colleyville, ISD
Solution
After demoing LogicMonitor for several months, GCISD knew they had found the solution they needed. Now, they are able to monitor their entire infrastructure in one place. Automatic discovery saves the technology team time and gives them more flexibility to instantly see what they need. Using historical data and AI predictions, they are able to anticipate future problems like storage capacity needs.
“Having LogicMonitor ingest all of this data and pull all the logs together gives us a unified view of all of our systems and shows us how we can provide better network connectivity and solutions for all of our students,” said Berger. “And that was the power of LogicMonitor right out of the box.
Prior to using LogicMonitor, collecting the right information to address an issue could take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours. Now, with LogicMonitor, it’s virtually instantaneous. By integrating intelligent alerts from LogicMonitor with the help desk software, problems automatically generate a ticket so a technician can immediately be dispatched to fix it. When the issue is resolved, the ticket is closed automatically.
As we moved through the pandemic and the complete school system went online we realized that even a second of downtime or service interruption would severely impact instruction. Having a tool like LogicMonitor is so important to ensure that our technology is supporting our students and staff 24/7.
Kyle Berger Chief Technology Officer, Gravepine-Colleyville, ISD
Benefits
The benefits of a unified observability platform were demonstrated right away. After deploying LogicMonitor the district experienced an outage. LogicMonitor alerted the team within minutes, and they were able to restart the correct host and restore it before anyone was impacted. It’s this reason why since using LM, help desk tickets have been drastically reduced: most problems are solved before any student or staff member notices it.
“For us, true ROI isn’t just about return on investment, it’s also about the return on instruction,” explained Berger. “With the ability to foresee and anticipate problems we are able to ensure that we don’t have lost instruction time in our classrooms. This is immediately apparent when we had an issue with a building on campus, we were able to resolve it before students, teachers, or learning were impacted at all.”
Using LogicMonitor has also benefited departments beyond the network and engineering teams. Through custom LM dashboards, security teams can access all their security cameras for any school campus and leadership teams can see relevant statistics on network performance.
From keeping tabs on thousands of devices, consolidating a plethora of monitoring tools into one platform for greater visibility and ease of use, and leveraging AI-powered alerting and forecasting, LogicMonitor provides GCISD with the enterprise-grade SaaS monitoring solution it needs to support its students 24/7, wherever they are learning.