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's-Hertogenbosch Council

's-Hertogenbosch is a medium sized city in the southern Netherlands. The city’s council is responsible for delivering data services to public servants throughout the province of North Brabant including the city guard, fire department and traffic signaling. With this in mind, 's-Hertogenbosch’s IT team must ensure full, 24/7 performance of their 500+ server farm to ensure that these critical services keep running.

The Need for Opsview

Ron Vink joined s-Hertogenbosch Council in 2011 as an IT specialist tasked with managing its mainly virtualized estate running a mix of Unix, Linux and Windows operating systems. He also provides third-line support for the Council’s 700+ virtual desktops.

There was already a consensus within the Council that the existing Nagios® Core installation wasn’t fit for purpose. The installation was difficult to implement and Vink was particularly concerned that only a few members of his team had any knowledge of how it was configured.

“Apart from the risks posed by this situation, we had a serious administration bottleneck,” said Vink. “We needed a drop-in replacement for Nagios Core that allowed us to easily add devices and extensions using an intuitive GUI.”

In addition to addressing the incumbent monitoring tool’s complexity, the Council also needed to demonstrate they consistently met the service levels promised to their stakeholders. For any network infrastructure provider, and particularly for those looking after critical public services, such SLAs are essential.

“Our Operations Director doesn’t want the detail of which device is down or how much through-put a particular database is experiencing. That’s my job. He wants a single document to land in his inbox that shows him the services we provide meet the up-times and performance levels mandated by the Council,” said Vink.

Why Opsview?

After considering a number of IT monitoring tools, ‘s-Hertogenbosch chose Opsview Enterprise to provide a single, real-time view of their network infrastructure. Opsview Enterprise is a highly scalable, enterprise class software suite that provides network, IT, server, application and cloud monitoring.

Opsview Enterprise’s breadth of coverage and distributed architecture met the Council’s requirement to monitor a wide range of different technologies in multiple locations.

The solution’s automated reporting tools have proved ideal for providing senior managers with a high level overview of system health and performance against agreed service levels.

The new dashboard features are also popular with Vink and his colleagues:

“We’re installing a big screen up in our Network Operations Centre where we’ll have separate dashboards for our virtualized desktop estate, Linux servers and Windows systems. Better visibility of service status means that our support desk is now aware and often fixing issues long before end-users start to raise support tickets.”

Deployment and Result 

Before deploying Opsview Enterprise 's-Hertogenbosch had trialed Opsview Community edition (now called Opsview Atom). While it was a marked improvement of its predecessor, Nagios Core, 's-Hertogenbosch felt that the reporting tools intuitive dashboards and scale out features provided in Opsview Enterprise offered the best overall solution for the Council.

“We’re delighted with the results so far,” reports Vink. “Opsview Enterprise not only gives us a single view of our extensive, diverse IT estate, it often helps us identify problems long before they start having an impact on our users.”

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