The Ministry of Public Education (MEP) serving Costa Rica is an educational organization with 80,000 employees. MEP is the technical and administrative body responsible for the accreditation, supervision, auditing, inspection, and control of private schools, from preschool and beyond. MEP also ensures diverse educational opportunities in this Central American country as it provides a Comprehensive Care Centers for Adults with Disabilities (CAIPAD).
MEP is an established government agency supported by five data centers and 181 servers. However, the MEP IT team did not use a monitoring solution to manage its network infrastructure, resulting in blind spots that translated into frequent downtime. The lack of a reliable network performance monitoring (NPM) solution also led to an increased mean time to repair (MTTR). Further, MEP's network admins were not able to gain visibility into their network which made forecasting for current needs and future growth extremely difficult.
The MEP IT team was faced with several challenges because it did not have the operational insights it required. Whenever there was a network issue, the MEP network administrators and technicians struggled to troubleshoot it, which hindered productivity. MEP also could not predict its bandwidth needs, and often encountered packet losses. Moreover, MEP's operational expenses kept increasing, prompting the IT team to evaluate NPM solutions in the marketplace to solve its problems.
"Before using ManageEngine OpManager, the condition of our equipment was uncertain. We could not visualize the condition of the network, and it was impossible to monitor our current traffic to determine if our network links were sufficient. We realized the problem too late, and our infrastructure equipment failed," explained Kenneth Vargas, an engineer at MEP.
MEP evaluated several NPM solutions in the market and selected OpManager after determining its affordability, functionality, scalability, ease of use, and multi-vendor support. OpManager became the organizations' front line of defense in tackling network problems, and began turning the tide in the MEP's favor.
Choosing OpManager helped MEP reduce network downtime, gain more visibility into bandwidth and traffic, improve troubleshooting, and reduce its operational costs. MEP IT technicians and admins use OpManager every day to monitor their switches, routers, WAN, servers, VMs, services, processes, databases, URLs, files, and folders.
OpManager's CPU, memory, and disk utilization functionalities improved MEP's network performance by helping IT admins maintain these metrics at optimal levels. When any of these metrics crosses the threshold value set, OpManager alerts the IT admins about the spikes so they can fix the issues before it causes adverse downtime.
"We have engineers in charge of monitoring the different alerts that OPM shows. OpManager allows us to enter the thresholds that we consider optimal for the proper functioning of our infrastructure," Vargas explained when addressing how useful threshold alerts are for monitoring a network.
OpManager also ensures endpoints and servers are healthy and operating optimally. The IT admins at MEP gain an immediate bird's-eye view of the availability across the entire network, which makes it easy for them to spot devices that are not up, within minutes.
Providing more than 100 prebuilt reports on network operations, all intuitively grouped and classified, OpManager enables flexible, customized options to help IT admins at MEP generate actionable reports quickly.
MEP uses the ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer add-on for OpManager. This helps the IT team identify and avoid bandwidth delays by systematically measuring bandwidth utilization and traffic in real time. The add-on accelerates troubleshooting, and resolves bandwidth issues faster, all from a single console.
MEP IT admins have demonstrated enhanced visibility into the network, resulting in improved infrastructure health and operational efficiency.
"OpManager anticipates problems and provides us with real visibility into our infrastructure. This assists us with performance issues, as well as with our infrastructure planning, forecasting, and decision-making," Vargas said.
"OpManager helps automate the monitoring of our technological infrastructure, enabling our staff to focus on other tasks, and providing us with the confidence that the application is constantly monitoring and will alert us to any potential problems," Vargas added.
An integral part of MEP's network monitoring, OpManager offers 360-degree support and assistance to its IT admins and technicians.
ManageEngine OpManager is a network management platform that helps organizations of all sizes, and service providers administer 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, and IP address management, as well as monitoring of networks, applications, databases, and virtualization. For more information about OpManager, visit manageengine.com/opmanager
