Like most state and local agency infrastructure teams, this state public land management agency operates with tight budgets, lean teams, and expanded mandates. This agency oversees the infrastructure for over a dozen business units, including disaster recovery, veteran benefits, and public-school funding.
With a wide scope and changing technology, the network infrastructure group knew it had outgrown its previous network monitoring solutions. They knew they needed a monitoring solution unique to their environment—one with flexibility and breadth and capable of significantly reducing the time and resources they spent—to see the results they wanted.
To achieve these goals, they implemented the SolarWinds® Platform*, created network redundancies, eliminated single points of failures, and leveraged user contributed templates to accelerate their time to value.
CHALLENGES
The network infrastructure group faces three challenges common to the public sector: tight budgets, fierce competition for talent, and complex infrastructure.
This tightly integrated team is also charged with managing the connectivity and delivery of application services for all six regional offices and several smaller field offices spread across roughly 250,000 square miles.
Our organization is comprised of over a dozen business units, and as a state agency, we’re responsible for a wide variety of services, yet our team is quite small,” said the information systems network administrator. “My team of just eight people handles all the networking, virtualization, storage, switches, and all servers and the applications and databases running on them.
As the complexity of this distributed environment has increased, IT leadership has standardized the network with Cisco® routers and switches and Palo Alto Networks® firewalls and incrementally shifted server and database assets to Amazon Web Services® . The agency’s on-premises and cloud-hosted Windows® Enterprise operating system is paired with VMware for virtualization and Okta for identity and access management.
As a state agency with so many different roles to fill our existing management structure, we didn’t really recognize the benefit of project management,” they recalled. “So we always ended up with too much going on and not enough time. And we were finding in order to monitor things, our existing solution cost us too much time to build what we needed.
RESULTS
Before consolidating the monitoring tools in use and centering their networking management on SolarWinds solutions, troubleshooting was time-consuming, and alerts originating from data silos required reviewing log metrics from disparate tools in use.
We had a hodgepodge of monitoring solutions in use, none of which really talked to each other,” stated a systems analyst on the network infrastructure team. They added the agency’s biggest challenge as it’s grown has been gaining end-to-end visibility of its hybrid infrastructure and far-flung hardware and devices
To more efficiently serve the technology needs of their workforce, which fluctuates between 800 to 1,000 on-site and remote employees, management has standardized on SolarWinds solutions for infrastructure management and monitoring while reducing their hardware footprint in favor of a growing percentage of services hosted in their private cloud. As the number of modules activated and SolarWinds solutions in use have grown, pulling data from each solution has paid dividends in time and cost savings in troubleshooting and performing routine maintenance.
Until we activated some carefully chosen modules, it was challenging to correlate log file alerts and troubleshoot network issues, which could be originating almost anywhere between our data center and remote users,” they recalled. “Last month, two regional offices went offline. Using NetPath
, we referred to the map display and tracked down the issue minutes after the alert came in and before the other location even noticed the outage. In fact, [SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor] (NPM) was the first SolarWinds solution we deployed.
As the number of modules activated and SolarWinds solutions in use have grown, pulling data from each solution has paid dividends in time and cost savings in troubleshooting and performing routine maintenance.
Tasks such as pushing IO patches to the Cisco switches and updating nodes have been greatly simplified and standardized,” they stated. “The centralized monitoring made possible by SolarWinds results in measurable manpower savings, a big win for us.
Due to its status as a state agency, all data stored and maintained on-site and in the cloud—as well as voice, digital, and web-based communications—must adhere to strict and highly granular state cybersecurity and privacy standards.
There is no question SolarWinds products have had a favorable impact on our IT security and in keeping our standards in line with the state cybersecurity council,” they said. “Our goal was to provide all IT and security stakeholders with a single-pane-of-glass visibility, and solutions such as SAM (Server & Application Monitor), Server Configuration Monitor, and Patch Manager give us that capability
Among the goals of IT leadership was to ensure network redundancy in support of elevated service levels.
A lot of our network tends not to have single points of failure anymore,” they stated. “Our entire network used to be one gigantic single point of failure. But nowadays, we can withstand quite a lot of stuff dropping dead and still continue to provide service. If a single point of failure drops dead in the middle of the day, we need to know about it right now, and we use existing alerting to provide that information.
Another element giving SolarWinds an edge over other solutions was the strong user community and the resources posted by THWACK® members.
It’s so simple to perform a search and choose a user-contributed template,” they added. “And then it shows up inside of [the SolarWinds Platform]. The community was the thing that pushed us over the edge to become a SolarWinds shop.
The degree to which the IT department has transitioned from reactive to proactive can best be summed up in comments made by the organization’s CIO, who likened the level of service availability to that of a public utility.
We do an annual survey for employees to tell us how they think we’re doing, and recently, the CIO of our agency said we’ve gone from being an organization that provides service to behaving more like electric companies; you flick the light switch, and then on the light goes,” they said. “We’ve turned into a team with raised expectations. Our monitoring platform lets us understand our environment and provides an overarching view.
In the final analysis, they emphasized the advantage the SolarWinds Platform brings to any organization with personnel and budgetary limitations. SolarWinds offers interconnectedness to all levels of the IT team, from the background services to the customer portal and the THWACK and SWUG communities.
It means you’re not alone when you’re using it. We’re now monitoring much more of an environment than we’ve ever been able to do because of the breadth of the products we have with SolarWinds,” they commented. “Today, we own all sorts of [SolarWinds Platform] modules, and we’ll probably continue to keep adding modules over time. It’s all with the goal of trying to get further down the path of effective monitoring but also to make it easier for my team to find issues. And that’s where having all that data in there is really important for us.
Employees: 800 – 1,000
IT Environment: On-premises and virtualized private cloud network and server infrastructure.
Product Mix:
- Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
- Server & Application Monitor (SAM)
- Network Topology Mapper (NTM)
- Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
- Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
- IP Address Manager (IPAM)
- Kiwi Syslog® Server
- NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
- Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)
- Web Performance Monitor (WPM) Traffic Analyzer
- SolarWinds® Database Mapper
