Customer case study: Loyola University, Chicago

Company overview:

Loyola University, Chicago has 11 colleges and schools; it offers over 80 undergraduate and 140 graduate/professional programs to over 16,000 students in the US and international locations from Beijing to Rome.

Business challenges:

• Monitoring and managing complex hybrid IT with limited budget, time, and manpower
• Growing demand for services strained legacy infrastructure that struggled to scale
• Pressure from students and faculty to maintain high service levels

Solution:

• Opsview Infrastructure Monitoring 
• Opsview Dashboard

Business benefits:

• Knows when problems occur, along with the severity and risk of user impact
• Improved reporting process enables faster issue recognition, resolution
• Reduced time spent “fighting fires”
• Can better serve university’s IT communities globally as they grow

University challenge: Scalable, global IT monitoring

Managing IT within academic establishments is no easy feat. IT teams are under incredible pressure from students and faculty alike to deliver top-quality service levels while driving IT innovation.

Budgets, time and manpower are usually tight, and IT departments do not want to waste them fighting fires within their complex hybrid IT estates.

The IT department at Loyola University, Chicago was no exception. It was continually faced with growing demand for services, straining legacy infrastructure which struggled to scale. They needed sophisticated software to help maintain critical service levels.

Managing large IT infrastructures across geographies

Academic institutions such as Loyola face interesting challenges, with academic buildings and student housing spread globally. The need for reliability and accuracy when monitoring their IT estate is essential.

The pressure to secure the best and brightest students does not solely rest on the faculty, IT departments face many of the same stresses to provide truly connected campuses and reliable infrastructure - from online learning to interactive classrooms.

Ultimately the realm of Loyola’s IT organization extends far beyond providing skilled technical expertise and providing secure resources. To achieve its vision of leading innovation for the university community, Loyola needed a monitoring solution that afforded the time to innovate - and most importantly could scale as it grew.

The challenge

Having previously used Nagios, Loyola University-Chicago realized its limitations as a solution. The team quickly ran into scalability issues and they did not have access to the monitoring capabilities that promoted sustainable growth.

Loyola needed an easily configurable, scalable and reliable monitoring solution which could monitor everything from syslog servers through to enforcing network security measures. The team needed a more efficient manner of ensuring its infrastructure (both on-premises and in the cloud) was providing top-quality service to users.

The benefits of Opsview

After comparing vendors, Loyola University-Chicago found that Opsview was the right solution. Opsview was an efficient Nagios alternative that did not require hours of configuration or loss of existing work. The execution and set-up were simple, along with the implementation.

The team extensively used Opsview’s dashboards, keywords, and alerting features - all of which are vital to their daily operations - which aided in increasing uptime for the university.

With keywords fed into alerting, Loyola can utilize pinpoint accuracy and insight into its infrastructure, knowing when problems occur, and the severity and risk of impact to their users. This greatly reduced the time spent fighting fires.

The accuracy and customization of Opsview also allowed the team to enjoy a stable reporting process, to quickly pinpoint any issues. This has added value to the IT organization’s role within university operations - now and into the future.

Loyola University-Chicago appreciated the responsive customer service and insightful technical support from Opsview. Today that continues to help their IT teams keep up with the growth-rate of students and staff.

Opsview plays an integral role in supporting Loyola’s technology communities throughout the university, and around the world.