Rojan Australia Pty Ltd was established in July 2001 from the merger of two previous businesses with over fifteen years’ combined experience in delivering IT solutions in the Sydney metropolitan area. The organization is a managed IT services provider that provides support to a wide variety of customers, from individuals to small and large businesses. Rojan provides services such as hosted Microsoft Exchange, Xen Citrix servers, rack space, internet links, and desktop support.
Rojan's IT infrastructure is comprised of 500 servers and seven data centers in a distributed network. Rojan's network operations team monitors servers, networks, virtual devices, storage systems, databases, files and folders, and URLs on a daily basis.
Before setting up OpManager, Rojan's IT staff spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting issues. Blake Mobbs, IT specialist at Rojan, shares his experience on the state of IT operations before implementing OpManager.
"Previously, we used Solarwinds Orion to monitor our private network and servers. The alerting system felt clunky, and it was sometimes difficult to navigate the interfaces to find what we wanted. OpManager changed that. Each interface tells you what you're configuring on each screen; helpful tips are also provided!
"The UI in OpManager is perfect, the interfaces are set out in such a way that we could open a new installation and get everything set up the way we needed within an hour, if not 30 minutes. Looking at the price point, the functionality, agentless monitoring capability, and usability, we went for OpManager."
Rojan's IT staff regularly keeps an eye on OpManager's router and switch performance monitors; server performance monitors; VMware, HyperV, and Xen monitors; service monitors; process monitors; file and folder monitors; application monitors (MSSQL, Exchange); and event logs, syslogs, and SNMP traps. CPU, memory, disk usage, and availability are prominent key performance indicators (KPIs) for Rojan's network monitoring operations.
"Using OpManager, we monitor these for all servers based on a specific threshold. Every two minutes we poll each applicable server for CPU, RAM, and HDD usage, and if a threshold is reached after two consecutive polls (four minutes total) we get notified and can investigate the cause of something like 95 percent CPU usage for four straight minutes on a server that is generally utilizing less than 40 percent of the CPU.
"We also monitor the status of servers every minute. In the event a server is not responding to status polls, we're alerted within two minutes," explains Mobbs. "We loved OpManager's easy installation and setup, threshold-based alerting, intuitive reports, user-friendly UI, workflow automation, business view map, and rack view."
OpManager has been a boon in many ways, particularly for Rojan's business continuity. "As a hosted service provider, the most critical aspects we monitor would be the basics: CPU, RAM, and HDD. Currently we have notification profiles that not only alert us, but also our hosted customers, if storage is running low. This way both sides are aware of the issue, and we can communicate more effectively in resolving any issues."
Rojan is currently using other ManageEngine products-Applications Manager and ServiceDesk Plus-which have both been integrated with OpManager. "We are currently monitoring hosted customer servers such as SQL servers, domain controllers, and Exchange servers with polls every few minutes to detect and notify us of any issues. Monitors are easy to configure and alerts provide detailed information about domain replication failure and service down notifications with Applications Manager.
"The second add-on is the ServiceDesk Plus integration. All servers are monitored for disk space. If a threshold is reached, OpManager sends an email alert and automatically logs a ticket in ServiceDesk Plus, so all our technicians are aware of it within a minute."
"Overall, we like that OpManager has the ability to configure multiple performance monitors and thresholds from one single interface. We were able to configure over 300 servers within one to two minutes using the thresholds we wanted. We saved hours compared to using previous applications. Not only this, but we have also configured discovery rules. We have many different business views and subnets; we can scan our network daily to discover new devices and automatically assign them to the correct notification profile and business view based on an IP range! This would take a substantial amount of time if we were doing it manually.
"Workflows have been saving several minutes per day that can be otherwise used elsewhere. We can rely on workflows to perform a basic task. An example would be using workflows for deleting thousands of older log files at the end of each week or month on numerous servers, and receiving an email report on what was successful and what wasn't. We are no longer stuck running tasks on servers after we realized they have not been running for ages!" Mobbs exclaimed.
Rojan estimates to have saved $100,000 on the cost of downtime/year, $30,000 on additional hardware/year, and $50,000 on the cost of maintenance/year.
ManageEngine OpManager is a network management platform that helps enterprises, service providers, and SMEs manage their data centers and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost-effectively. Automated workflows, intelligent alerting engines, configurable discovery rules, and extendable templates enable IT teams to set up a 24/7 monitoring system within hours of installation. Do-it-yourself add-ons extend the scope of management to include network change and configuration management, IP address management, as well as monitoring of networks, applications, databases, and virtualization. For more information about OpManager, visit manageengine.com/opmanager.