Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) provides retirement, disability and survivor benefit programs for public employees throughout the state who are not covered by another state or local retirement system.
The Situation
The Data Engineering (DE) team at OPERS is in charge of scheduling downtime and maintenance for their large scale server environment. These servers handle critical processes and applications for the business organization, so the DE team has to ensure that whenever a server is taken down for maintenance, the other servers can handle the workload appropriately. Previously, the DE team didn’t have any information or visibility into utilization trends or graphs depicting peak usage hours on the servers, so the team was left assuming which servers could handle what loads during certain hours of the day. These assumptions led to significant lags across the business, causing delays on services across the organization. The DE team was also being requested by their internal customers, teams like operations, finance, and executive management, to send reports displaying why the chosen servers were taken offline for maintenance.
The Solution
In early 2021, the IT infrastructure team at OPERS made the switch from Solarwinds to LogicMonitor due to security concerns and a need for an observability platform to make the transition to a hybrid environment more fluid and efficient. With this migration, the IT team gained new capabilities for monitoring and displaying key information, including the ability to create custom dashboards to monitor and log their server utilization – a capability that was instrumental in their decision in implementing LogicMonitor. These custom dashboards also allowed for more collaboration between the IT team and the DE team. The IT team gave viewing permissions to the DE team, who started using these new graphs to inform their server maintenance schedule.
The Results
By implementing LogicMonitor, the DE team now has a straightforward way of accessing server performance and scheduling maintenance. LogicMonitor’s custom dashboards and graphs help the team draft a SDT policy and schedule that no longer causes lags across the business. The success of the cross collaboration between the teams has also benefited the internal customer groups, as the DE team can now provide solid data justifying their decision-making, allowing their strategy and success to be viewed across the entire organization. One member of the DE team has praised LogicMonitor for making his role easier and is particularly thankful to have a monitoring solution in place that can help demonstrate his effectiveness and analytical thinking.