March 30, 2023
"If we were trying to do today with bits and pieces what we are doing with SolarWinds, I can’t imagine what labor resources it would take to do that. And by no means would you have that cohesive view of everything..." - Jeppie Sumpter Western Kentucky University, Assistant VP for Information Technology
ABOUT WESTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY
The main Western Kentucky University (WKU) campus is located in Bowling Green, the third largest city in Kentucky. The university also has satellite locations and accommodates remote learning. A mid-size university, the WKU student body is around 16,000, with approximately 2,700 full-time and part-time employees. The IT team is made up of about 90 people and serves as a centralized shop for the university.
CHALLENGES
Though the pandemic kicked remote learning into a whole new dimension, as a mid-size university, WKU already supported on-campus and off-campus learning. Their end users, students, faculty, and staff expect to be able to access systems and apps at all times from anywhere, and they often need to be able to attend class or submit assignments online. As a result, the IT team views their network as borderless, requiring solutions to support WKU’s needs.
WKU has trusted SolarWinds solutions for over 15 years. Despite the vast variety of vendors and solutions on the market, Jeppie Sumpter, assistant vice president for information technology at Western Kentucky University, states for them, it’s about more than trying to find the best price, coolest solution, or biggest promises. They need a product capable of providing the solution they need and excellent service at a reasonable price. Sumpter says, “It isn’t only about the product. From a product management perspective, I think we have seen balance [with SolarWinds] that I don’t always see with some other vendors.”
However, for Sumpter, the most important element is the relationship between WKU and SolarWinds. “Not only is it the product, but it is also the team of people at SolarWinds,” he says.
"If we are trying to find a solution or achieve goals, we’ve always been able to turn to our partners at SolarWinds to figure out ways to achieve those goals. I’ve seen products and vendors suffer because of the focus on driving new customers. But what has made us so successful is our SolarWinds relationship… that we are seeing development and features that also cater to the existing customer." - Jeppie Sumpter Western Kentucky University, Assistant VP for Information Technology
Before partnering with SolarWinds (and over the years since), Sumpter’s team has worked to bring their system from separate disjointed tools into a cohesive environment. So when they wanted to adopt new technologies utilizing automation and observability, Sumpter knew SolarWinds would have a solution for WKU. “With the team at SolarWinds, if we are trying to find a solution or achieve goals, we’ve always been able to turn to our partners at SolarWinds to figure out ways to achieve those goals,” he says.
Before partnering with SolarWinds (and over the years since), Sumpter’s team has worked to bring their system from separate disjointed tools into a cohesive environment. So when they wanted to adopt new technologies utilizing automation and observability, Sumpter knew SolarWinds would have a solution for WKU. “With the team at SolarWinds, if we are trying to find a solution or achieve goals, we’ve always been able to turn to our partners at SolarWinds to figure out ways to achieve those goals,” he says.
SOLUTION
Western Kentucky University was one of the first higher education customers to adopt SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability.
With Hybrid Cloud Observability, WKU can view their IT environment from all angles, enabling them to create automation rules and uncover potential issues before they arise. Hybrid Cloud Observability provides WKU with a simple, easy-to-navigate solution to observability built to empower IT teams to improve mean time to discovery and resolve issues capable of impacting the entire university ecosystem.
Sumpter describes the observability capabilities of the SolarWinds Platform: “If we were trying to do today with bits and pieces of open source what we are doing with SolarWinds, I can’t imagine what the labor resources would entail,” he says. “And by no means would you have that cohesive view of everything, which is where the real power comes into play. The tools, the features that SolarWinds has now, as we’re getting into artificial intelligence (AI) and baselining concepts and anomaly detection, it’s far beyond just focusing on what is not performing well. Hybrid Cloud Observability gives us a tremendous amount of assistance to figure out where these problems are happening because it looks deep and wide and gives us that end-to-end view.”
MEET HYBRID CLOUD OBSERVABILITY
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability empowers customers with comprehensive visibility across on-premises and hybrid environments to help them reduce tool sprawl, accelerate issue resolution, gain deployment flexibility, and be cloud-ready. Hybrid Cloud Observability is a full-stack observability solution designed to optimize performance, ensure availability, and accelerate remediation.
Built on the SolarWinds Platform, Hybrid Cloud Observability provides unified visibility across hybrid IT environments by connecting and correlating data across networks, infrastructure, applications, databases, and security for rapid time to value and lower total cost of ownership. With flexible self-hosted deployment options and a path to the cloud via SolarWinds Observability*, Hybrid Cloud Observability will meet you where you are today and enable you to migrate at your own pace.
* Additional purchase may apply.
