HID Global Opens the Door to Better Microservices Insight with LogicMonitor

Challenge

HID Global is a leader in secure identity offerings serving customers in more than 100 countries through a rich portfolio of offerings that includes access control, mobile access solutions, biometric authentication systems, ID card and badge printing, location services, and visitor management systems.

Like many tech innovators, HID Global depends on its global network infrastructure to support solutions for customers. “HID is moving toward the cloud,” said Balaji Jeeva, Manager, Cloud Operations at HID Global. “We have migrated most of our legacy applications into Amazon Web Services (AWS), and we still have a few customers who rely on data center hosted applications that reside on-premises. Our IT team monitors about 2500 cloud resources, and 1500 standard devices.”

Container-based technologies are key to powering the business agility that HID needs to bring new products and services to market faster. Kubernetes orchestration tools play a vital role in enabling the company to manage and monitor these containers. However, HID lacked the visibility it needed to monitor its Kubernetes clusters, and their containerized applications, making it difficult to assure performance and availability. “We tried monitoring our environments with Prometheus and Grafana, but we made only limited progress,” said Jeeva.

Solution

HID Global needed a solution to monitor all the elements across its hybrid IT infrastructure, as well as its containerized applications, from a single pane of glass. After evaluating several options, the organization chose the LogicMonitor infrastructure monitoring platform.

LogicMonitor was the only offering that provided monitoring, visualization, and support for Kubernetes monitoring, in a single comprehensive solution. “We rely solely on LogicMonitor for monitoring our on-premises and cloud resources, saving the support team time associated with multiple monitoring tools,” said Krishnan. “When it comes to programs, at the high level we want to monitor factors such as CPU, disk usage, and other variables. We can monitor different parameters for different programs and determine the uptime and availability of each one.”

HID leverages containers primarily for its AWS workloads. With LogicMonitor, the organization can get insight into ECS and other AWS services, and configure monitoring to measure the processes that are most closely related to application performance. “We support many of our customers on the AWS environment, and we monitor them with LogicMonitor and LM Container,” said Krishnan. “For example, we often concentrate on monitoring when ports are down, and for how long. These factors will have a direct impact on the stability of our applications.”

Benefits

HID Global was an early adopter of LogicMonitor Kubernetes Monitoring, and the solution is already delivering significant dividends.

For the first time, HID Global has gained the centralized visibility required for real-time understanding of the health of its workloads. For IT, the result is reduced time troubleshooting, and fewer support calls. The company’s end-customers simply experience these benefits as more dependable performance. “We have created dashboards to keep track of the uptime and availability of our programs, which gives more value add for us when it comes to management,” said Krishnan. “Under our previous environment, we used to perform separate health checks for each program. LogicMonitor dashboards are key for us in helping to ensure high availability for our end customers.”

As HID Global continues to explore containers and Kubernetes orchestration, LogicMonitor stands ready to support the company’s expanding portfolio of IoT and physical security solutions in the years ahead. “Our team has started exploring LogicMonitor’s capabilities more extensively, and we plan to steadily configure our solution to support more of our programs.”