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Cisco Global

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and sells networking equipment. Cisco is one of the largest network equipment manufacturers in the world and a fortune 500 company. They are listed as the number 12 world’s most valuable brands by Forbes.

Cisco currently monitors over 700 devices across 10 locations worldwide, including India, Prague, London and various locations across the USA.

The Need for Opsview

Previously using Nagios, Cisco was struggling to get the system deployed across the globe. With multiple labs, development operations teams and developers dotted around the world, Cisco was looking for a tool which would allow them to combine their monitoring into a single dashboard.

It was imperative that the real time status of their IT infrastructure was displayed in one place. Being a networking company in the technology sector led them to the realization of the need for customizable dashboards and a flexible, intuitive monitoring solution.

Due to the critical nature of the business, Cisco needed to be immediately aware if something went wrong. With all this currently missing from their business, it meant Cisco needed to start looking at alternative solutions.

Cisco fundamentally required their entire global IT infrastructure monitored. This included their virtualization platforms and extremely secure, internal private cloud. Their development team had to be able to add devices and monitor them individually, in a multitenant and secured environment.

Opsview Enterprise offered Cisco an integrated GUI and advanced auto-discovery, meaning that configuration and migration would be very straightforward. The drag and drop dashboards would give Cisco the power to configure their monitoring in the best way that suited them. As Cisco’s IT estate grew, Opsview would grow with them.

Deployment and Result

The actual installation of Opsview Enterprise was easy. Brian Wilson, a System’s Engineer at Cisco reported. “Opsview was easy to get up and running, it didn’t take long to fully install. To get a wide device base into the system took a bit longer, but this was due to the coordination of people in various locations, once this happened it was a breeze!”

Opsview has helped Cisco get a better overall picture of what’s going on across the whole organization.

The rapid installation and deployment, combined with the easy to use GUI has made it easier for sysadmins who are not familiar with monitoring systems to add devices when needed.

Brian went on to talk about their previous system. “Nagios was hard to use, employees needed to know exactly what to do. Opsview has given them a GUI which they can just log on to and use without an in depth understanding.”

Cisco faced a big challenge when their monitoring database and master server was running on the same box as the web interface, causing the system to run really slow. This meant reloads were taking longer and the GUI was less responsive. After contacting Opsview support they moved to another box and everything has been working as expected ever since.

Brian Wilson commented, “So far support has been great! Every time we’ve had a problem, support has got back to us quickly and found a solution. Deployment support has been really helpful and showed us better ways of doing things every time.”

Cisco is now able to fix issues before they become a problem. They are now proactive as a department which extends to the business as well. Opsview’s Business Service Monitoring tool has had huge benefits by allowing Cisco to visualize which service will be impacted and running checks on who has actually been affected. It’s given them a quick overview to see who’s having a problem at the exact time it's happening so it can quickly be resolved. Brian said “Here at Cisco we can already see big benefits from switching to Opsview”.

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