There isn’t a more inclusive product out there I’m aware of that does more elements of performance and monitoring than SolarWinds and maintains a reasonable cost compared to competitors.
— Matt Mayer, IT Operations Senior Analyst
About Mortgage Connect
Mortgage Connect LP is a mortgage service provider headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with operations in New York, Texas, California, Colorado, Oklahoma and Ohio. The company provides origination, default, and valuation services to the national mortgage and capital markets sectors. Over the past decade, Mortgage Connect has rapidly expanded its market share through an unwavering commitment to unequaled customer service, establishing the company and its subsidiaries as an industry leader.
Recently, the editors at Inc. Magazine named Mortgage Connect to its 5,000’s list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies for the third year in a row, an achievement Chief Executive Officer Jeff Coury credits to the firm’s “service first” philosophy.
Challenges
With over 1,000 servers, eight remote sites, and a central data center in Pittsburgh, the company’s infrastructure has traditionally been a heterogeneous environment with a heavy reliance on virtual servers and approximately 10% of its workloads in Azure© and AWS©.
As a busy originator of mortgages and service provider to hundreds of banks, credit unions, and lenders, Matt Mayer, IT operations senior analyst, oversees the constant flow of electronic documentation. In his position as the only engineer charged with ensuring optimal performance of the firm’s highly distributed operations, Mayer says the high volume of origination, underwriting, and loan settlement forms and applications require a high degree of 24/7 monitoring.
Among the challenges facing the firm’s small but agile IT team were alert fatigue and delayed issue resolution. Due to the lack of dashboards displaying pertinent information, finding the root cause of application slowness and network performance issues was mainly reactive.
“We have 11 people on the system admin team, which I’m part of,” Mayer adds. “Initially, when I started there, the on-call person was just getting destroyed with too many alerts. They would be woken up multiple times at night, many times for non-actionable issues.”
In addition to the infrastructure challenges posed by rapid growth, acquisitions made by the growing company required a thorough review, analysis, and integration of existing technology infrastructure. Following each acquisition, the thousands of applications typically in use must be cataloged, reviewed, and integrated into the firm’s existing multi-location environment.
Results
“When I arrived here in early 2021, SolarWinds was already in place, and familiarity was one of the skill sets they were looking for,” Mayer recalls. “Since then, we’ve added in a number of additional SolarWinds products—we have added virtual management to the core solution as well as AppOptics™, Loggly®, Pingdom®, and Database Performance Analyzer.”
With oversight of 6,600 services under his purview and roughly 1,200 mostly Windows® services, Mayer says he finds the brain trust available in the THWACK® community a valuable source of support and answers to questions.
“An example of how SolarWinds makes life easier is when we’re absorbing the infrastructure of a company we’ve acquired,” Mayer says. “Often, these firms were using piecemeal monitoring solutions, and I needed to review exactly what’s in use so they can be ingested into our monitoring solution without creating alert sprawl. Typically, once we work through a few firewall exceptions, getting (a company’s infrastructure) ingested into our SolarWinds products is not an issue.”
Benefits
Teamwork is essential to ensure his duties as monitoring and performance manager extend across the entire infrastructure, Mayer comments. Among his goals upon joining Mortgage Connect was to automate license and certificate maintenance. He counts on the DevOps and QA teams to help maximize the capabilities of SolarWinds® AppOptics.
“We use AppOptics to reign in some of the alerts, but it’s mostly an after-the-fact tool as well,” he says.
“QA relies on AppOptics to help them fine-tune and prevent issues before they get into production and find the root cause. Knowing application slowness issues or application pool issues is a huge benefit. In revamping our certificate renewal process, SolarWinds is the main measure for getting it done effectively.”
In addressing the degree to which SolarWinds solutions have empowered Mortgage Connect’s lean IT team to manage the firm’s sprawling, multi-location environment comprised of on-premises servers and VMware® and Azure virtual machines, Mayer says the reduction in the volume of alerts has been key to streamlining issue resolution and service improvement.
Currently, we have every single critical service—regardless of whether it’s running on-prem, in VMware, or on Azure—monitored by SolarWinds, all with reload scripts. Because we have a pretty large in-house development team and a lot of our own services and .NET applications we’ve developed in-house, getting those all monitored to find out the right ones across the board was also a lengthy process.
With SolarWinds, we’ve greatly fine-tuned the alerting, enabling us to be more proactive with positioning people around the dashboards. With 1,000 servers and a good amount of in-house applications, you’ll always have occasional service crashes in the middle of the night, but they’ve become a lot more manageable.
Due to a strong culture of measuring the performance of databases, applications, and monitoring systems, Mayer says the CIO holds regular meetings to review quantifiable results generated by SolarWinds solutions such as Database Performance Analyzer, AppOptics, Loggly, and Pingdom.
“Since I started at Mortgage Connect, we’ve created over 200 new alert templates,” he states. “Despite all of the new alerts, we have had an 86% decrease in alerts. That’s a pretty big reduction, and it’s related to rightsizing virtual servers, proactively fixing volume issues, and assisting the database, QA, and development teams using SolarWinds tools.”
The IT operations team at Mortgage Connect also has an eye on the future as they continue their cloud migration journey with the SolarWinds Platform and SolarWinds Observability.
“The SolarWinds Observability anomaly detection looks really good. It’s something I’ve craved,” says Mayer. “Our CIO has challenged us to be more proactive and discover issues where we’re not sure what’s going on.”
I can get with developers, go in and click on a node, and scan quickly to see what the anomalies are, whether they’re on the virtual or physical side. The whole idea is to prevent outages by finding issues before they become issues. The dev teams will be excited.
