Virteva Monitors More, Reduces Alert Noise by 96% with LogicMonitor

Virteva is an IT-managed service provider with more than 12 years experience in the service desk industry. The company offers a suite of as-a-Service solutions for ServiceNow and Microsoft cloud environments including comprehensive 24/7 support. Virteva’s wide-ranging support includes services for a variety of Microsoft cloud tools and services, including Office 365 and migration to Azure cloud. Virteva is also a Microsoft Gold Partner for both Cloud Platform and Cloud Productivity.

Providing 24/7 support for multiple platforms and deployments poses challenges. For Virteva, it meant a piecemeal solution with multiple monitoring tools. This approach meant users had to:

• Learn to work in multiple environments

• Adapt to different (and often prohibitive) requirements for customization

Using multiple monitoring tools also meant Virteva could not:

• Easily aggregate outputs like graphs and visualizations

• Have a big-picture view of a client’s entire IT infrastructure

In addition, reporting was a challenge. For example, Microsoft and Linux servers each had their own unique reporting systems that had to be manually consolidated to obtain a wider view of the total infrastructure. Virteva’s multiple monitoring tools also generated more than 5000 alerts per month, which made effective response difficult.

To overcome the problems associated with using a patchwork of monitoring tools, Virteva set out to replace the four separate tools it used with a single platform that could comprehensively monitor clients’ IT infrastructures. Furthermore the company wanted to find a tool that could adapt to any use case Virteva’s clients brought to the company.

Virteva found a solution with LogicMonitor. Virteva Infrastructure Technician Matt Kerfoot says, “We switched to LogicMonitor because it allowed us to replace the four monitoring tools we were using with one single platform. That’s why we use and love LogicMonitor.” Now, Virteva is able to:

• Monitor all client infrastructure through a single portal.

• Monitor, report, and respond more effectively to problems, delivering on the company’s promise of 24/7 white glove service.

• Easily obtain the company’s sought-after big picture view of clients’ entire IT infrastructures.

• Rein in alerts, reducing the number from 5000+ per month to 200.

• Monitor more systems—including Linux and Java-based systems—than could be monitored previously with legacy tools or competing products.

“The hardest thing we faced before adopting LogicMonitor was the need to have an in-depth understanding of how multiple platforms function, and how to modify things within them,” says Kerfoot. “The platforms we were using before are completely different and require completely different approaches to operate. Bringing the number of places you have to make changes to down from four to one has made things so much easier.”

In addition to monitoring a far more extensive number of technologies out-of-the box, LogicMonitor also allows Virteva to build out custom monitoring to tackle almost any monitoring situation. Says Kerfoot, “LogicMonitor’s best feature is its ability to be customized to monitor almost anything. If something’s not already being monitored, the solution can be built out to monitor it. That is above and beyond. Anything that the technicians can think of, we can build into the platform.”

While not a security tool, the flexibility of LogicMonitor allowed Virteva to respond to a recently announced vulnerability even before their security software was updated to take account of the issue.

“When a user stays logged on to a session without logging out, it’s possible to hack in and get that user’s password out of memory,” says Kerfoot. “There was a big hack about a month ago, and we were able to scan all the machines in 15 minutes, and determine which machines were patched for the hack or not. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without LogicMonitor.”