Challenge
Lucy Group is a diversified international group with operating businesses across a number of sectors: Lucy Castings, Lucy Controls, Lucy Electric and Lucy Real Estate. Since its origin in Oxford, UK, over 200 years ago, the Group has grown and evolved. Lucy Group now employs over 1,400 people across 10 regions and operates in over sixty countries.
As a global business, Lucy Group depends on the availability and performance of its IT and networking infrastructure, which is located in data centers spanning the globe. Before switching to LogicMonitor, Lucy Group used a number of locally managed monitoring tools to keep systems up and running. “There were pockets of monitoring but no single overview of the infrastructure as a whole,” says Jamie McCready, Project and Systems Engineer at Lucy Group. “With no centralized monitoring system, it was hard to efficiently manage our global infrastructure.”
Both Jamie and Karl Franklin, Lucy Group’s Global Infrastructure Manager, knew that something had to change, especially as the group scaled its infrastructure to meet increased customer demand. A centralized monitoring system became essential to bridging the gap between technical and service delivery teams by providing visibility across the entire global infrastructure.
Solution
After evaluating a number of monitoring platforms, Lucy Group chose LogicMonitor to make life easier within their complicated business and reduce the risk of costly outages. They liked consolidating views within a single pane of glass and through unlimited customizable dashboards. The Lucy Group also liked the SaaS nature of the solution.
After just two months, Lucy Group was successfully monitoring 20 services. Today, Lucy Group continues adding workloads to LogicMonitor in addition to enhancing alerts and thresholds to meet business needs. The Group plans to integrate LogicMonitor with tools such as ServiceNow CMDB to enable automated transfer of information between systems and maximize their other tools. “We’ll also avoid duplicating information, which will save time and give us a single source of truth from a unified set of data,” says Jamie.
LogicMonitor lets us predict issues and intervene before users are affected or need to report a problem themselves. The platform’s alerts and reports mean there are fewer outages, which is fantastic news for productivity and business operations—and offers a real boost to the IT team’s morale.
Karl Franklin Global Infrastructure Manager, Lucy Group
Benefits
LogicMonitor’s comprehensive and customizable dashboards enabled Lucy Group to retire its previous monitoring tools and create a unique dashboard for each Lucy Group operation that shows relevant business-specific information.
The group has also set up escalation chains within the platform, so that comprehensive information about issues or incidents can be passed efficiently up the chain to make for speedier resolution and informed decision-making and rapid action.
Post-LogicMonitor implementation, there are fewer escalations than before thanks to Lucy Group’s service desk feeling empowered to do more than simply react to issues. Instead, the desk can be proactive with alert thresholds, so that issues can generally be identified and resolved before they reach a stage that requires escalation.
LogicMonitor lets us predict issues and intervene before users are affected or need to report a problem themselves,” says Karl. “IT works best when only administrators see the problems, and LogicMonitor is helping us get to that stage.”
He cites the simple example of being able to resolve a disk space issue before it becomes impossible to copy more files to the server. “The bottom line is that LogicMonitor’s alerts and reports mean there are fewer outages,” he says.
Karl also sleeps better post-LogicMonitor-implementation, as he no longer is woken up by outage-related calls in the middle of the night. In the first six months, the only midnight call he received was related to an air-conditioning outage at one of the data centers. “Our service desk used LogicMonitor to track the temperature of all the servers,” he recalls. “Getting an early alert prevented the air conditioning outage turning into a data center outage, which would have affected hundreds of people across the group.”
Because monitoring with LogicMonitor is also more efficient than other solutions, Lucy Group’s IT team can get more done with fewer people. “The SaaS-based nature of LogicMonitor also means there’s none of the backend admin or outage risk that come with hosting your own monitoring system,” says Karl. “Not having to monitor the monitoring system itself gives us peace of mind.”