For Gaylor Electric, the highest performing national electrical contractor, it is all about reliability

“SolarWinds provides us with a unified set of tools that solves several significant organizational issues in one pass.”

— Damien Solodow, Gaylor Electric, IS Senior Systems Engineer

About Gaylor Electric

Gaylor Electric, Inc. is a full-service industrial electrical contractor providing complete design-build electrical construction services and 24/7 on-demand nationwide maintenance and support. To maintain John Gaylor’s vision of upholding the company’s status as the “highest performing national contractor of excellence,” its workforce of electricians and service technicians benefit from ongoing safety training and certification, and access to the best available tools and technology.

Since its founding in 1984, Gaylor Electric’s leadership has fervently embraced a strict adherence to industry best practices and an ongoing commitment to state-of-the-art corporate infrastructure. Based on the overarching goal of “reliable resources, outcomes, insights,” the company’s 2,000 team members leverage its dominance within the industry to provide consistent excellence to its broad spectrum of customers in the commercial, industrial, and public sectors.

Challenge

From its earliest days as a regional electrical contractor serving the Indianapolis metropolitan area, the company has built a reputation for delivering predictable outcomes in designing, building, and maintaining electrical systems for new construction and serving existing projects. In addition to crediting its culture of free-enterprise and healthy competition for its growth and success, Gaylor Electric habitually harnesses technology to achieve greater efficiencies through transparent project management and information sharing between stakeholders and customers.

Over the past decade, as the company transitioned from an on-prem data center to a modern private cloud environment, challenges multiplied in gaining unified oversight of the increasingly distributed environment. As is common in IT infrastructures that have evolved organically, a hodge-podge of monitoring tools was in use across three principal IT support locations and on managed servers running SaaS and PaaS services in a virtualized private cloud.

When Damien Solodow, IS Senior Systems Engineer, arrived at Gaylor Electric five years ago, his immediate objective was to conduct an audit of IT assets in place and create a more proactive footing for the entire department.

“The primary challenges we needed to solve were to improve our network monitoring capabilities and modernize our systems management,” he recalls. “The prior use of imaging for deploying new machines was error-prone, and there were almost no formalized protocols for applications and update management.”

In addition to the volume of alert data was the question of relevance. For example, monitoring tools mostly provided server application log data but virtually no insights into network health or performance.

“The net result was continual firefighting to solve problems because IT simply didn’t have enough awareness. When your outage reports come from the help desk, it’s a very reactive environment, and you’re bouncing from one fire to the next due to a lack of unified visibility.”

Issues identified prior to SolarWinds deployment:

Monitoring tool sprawl and blind spots
Help desk tickets drove IT remediation activities
User experience issues were not identified effectively through monitoring
Troubleshooting was time-consuming
Delayed MTTR impacted productivity

In making his assessment, Solodow concluded that monitoring blind spots resulted in reliance on help desk tickets to find out about substandard user experiences. Routine troubleshooting took a great deal of time and effort, hamstringing problem-solving and preventing minor issues from escalating in the first place. Among the most pressing challenges:

Over-reliance on help desk tickets indicated customer experience was affected by poor visibility
IT support was far too reactive, resulting in slow MTTR
The lack of actionable insights caused labor-intensive troubleshooting, wasting resources
Incomplete monitoring data of the networks, systems, databases, and applications on-prem and in the private cloud

Solution

In seeking to reduce alert noise and consolidate the tools in use, Solodow turned to his experience using SolarWinds in his previous IT management roles.

“Having years of experience and a strong familiarity with the monitoring and alert functionality provided by SolarWinds products, I knew they would bring to bear the meaningful monitoring and alerting needed here at Gaylor Electric. I said to myself—we already know how to do this; why would we go look for a different tool?”

To solve several of the visibility challenges simultaneously, Solodow implemented the Orion® Platform, laying the foundation for moving toward a single version of truth view. Among the immediate goals was to arrive at total oversight of the virtualized servers and applications on the private cloud.

“We had Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) in place, causing unnecessary distractions due to a high volume of confusing Windows Server event logs, partially because we’d been too busy to tune settings to filter out much of it. We were not getting enough visibility of the routers, switches, firewalls, or third-party products.”

With Orion deployed, Solodow requested the network manager apply SNMP configurations to all nodes and devices for server discovery which instantly resulted in faster troubleshooting and remediation. Using Server & App Monitor (SAM) templates, alert noise was significantly thinned out. Monitoring metrics are now distributed to all stakeholders, furnishing a unified, single pane of glass dashboard to the entire team.

To support the pressing need for cross-stack data correlation, the PerfStack module now monitors network interface utilization, application performance, and database wait metrics, along with VM host memory usage within the firm’s private cloud.

Results

Customer Objectives:

Improved network monitoring capabilities and modernized systems management
Monitoring extended to deliver actionable insights into network health and performance
Eliminated blind sports with total oversight of virtualized servers and applications on their private cloud
Automated config backups reduce time and effort to restore network settings when needed
Reduced alert noise with SAM templates
Orion dashboard view distributes actionable intelligence available to the entire IT team
Faster troubleshooting resulted in compressing time from identifying an issue to mediation
Transitioned the IT team from a reactive posture to proactive

“Within 90 days, we were getting rid of alert noise and able to see relevant items to deal with versus the hail of noise. The whole process was greatly simplified by how everything fits together, especially the out-of-the-box templates for app monitoring.”

Solodow brought previously haphazard backup practices into line with automated config backups handled with Network Configuration Manager (NCM), eliminating the time-consuming task of manually recreating settings following outages. Now, he and his team of fifteen IT department colleagues and the seven-person engineering group have an at-a-glance status of the network and devices.

For Solodow’s growing team, SolarWinds’ Customer Success Center and the THWACK community are instrumental to a smooth onboarding process. Even those with limited SolarWinds-specific experience can quickly understand and begin using the tool.

“The SAM App insight templates have been tremendously helpful in detecting issues on the SQL side which need to be addressed and making it easy to deal with by providing reports to the DBA team. The performance metrics such as memory usage show when more hardware should be provisioned for the databases and system performance gains.”

Also in wide use is the Orion Web Console which Solodow says provides visibility to all team members interested in using a tool ‘to look at and work with’ with the frequency of their choosing.