GFK is Germany's largest market research institute and the fourth largest market research organization in the world. It has a global digital presence in over 60 countries with around 120 offices and has been providing consumer and market insights for over 85 years.
Being a market research company, GFK's main arena is studying data. To manage data, it has three internal data centers and 4,000 servers. However, GFK struggled to find the right solution while managing its data centers and relied on too many management platforms. It used individual vendor-based tools to manage parts of its network, which only further complicated its data management processes.
Daran Rowlands, global network manager at GFK, voiced his concerns, saying, "We had multiple management platforms by multiple vendors managing pockets of our network, but none of them were fully configured, and none of them gave a global view."
While GFK tried to find a solution to manage devices from multiple vendors, it came across OpManager, finding that it fit all of GFK's requirements like a glove. With its multi-vendor capabilities, OpManager helped GFK manage the network performance of devices from different vendors and played a key role in cutting down the money spent on multiple tools.
GFK utilized OpManager's unified approach to scale and manage its distributed IT infrastructure and reaped the benefits. OpManager's advanced fault and performance management function helped solve several performance issues across critical IT resources like firewalls, routers, and switches. On top of that, the network admins at GFK were able to troubleshoot network issues faster and saw a standard improvement in the overall network outcome. This prompted GFK to use OpManager daily and develop a routine of gathering regular insights on its network performance, bandwidth, and availability of resources.
Speaking about his team's OpManager routine, Rowlands says, "We have a maturing KPI reporting regime, and OpManager is being used to gather various stats on things such as Internet performance, hardware/software currency, and circuit availability."
OpManager helps GFK monitor the availability, health, and performance of its switches. OpManager offers visibility into the ports that are blocked and the ones that are forwarding. On top of that, OpManager helps the operators identify the overutilized and underutilized ports, and helps them make important decisions on resource utilization management.
OpManager resolves issues in network latency, bandwidth allocation, high traffic utilization sources, and critical routers; it also ensures high availability of devices, plans future capacity requirements, and minimizes recurring costs on WAN links. The operators at GFK are now efficiently managing WAN links and routers that were once too complex to handle.
GFK's network operators can set alerts when a service or health check counter on a device exceeds or goes below a certain limit and have OpManager notify them via SMS, email, syslogs, and SNMP traps. This helps them always keep an eye on their network without being physically present at their data centers. On top of this, OpManager's alerting mechanism has proven effective in identifying the root cause of problems and fixing them before their end users are affected.
GFK uses NetFlow Analyzer as an add-on to OpManager to take care of its bandwidth and traffic monitoring needs. NetFlow Analyzer gives GFK complete visibility into bandwidth consumption and traffic details across apps, devices, interfaces, and IPs. NetFlow Analyzer also helps the operators make informed decisions on their network's bandwidth growth using capacity planning reports. After resolving network congestion issues and bandwidth bottlenecks, NetFlow Analyzer has proved its worth.
GFK also uses Network Configuration Manager to trigger configuration backups, manage changes, audit compliance, and automate repetitive tasks using configlets. Rowlands says, "Network Configuration Manager configuration backups are extremely valuable. The compliance reporting is something we've recently introduced, and it is proving to be a great way of ensuring that we remain within our standards."
Apart from useful functions, GFK is impressed by OpManager's user-specific dashboards, simple UI, business view maps, and affordable pricing. OpManager turned out to be the complete package for GFK, which is now a happy customer of ManageEngine.
OpManager is a network management platform that helps organizations, service providers, and small medium enterprises manage their data centers and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost effectively. Automated workflows, intelligent alerting engines, discovery rules, and extendable templates enable IT teams to set up a 24/7 monitoring system quickly and easily. 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.