July 13, 2023
"With the introduction of SolarWinds, we were able to identify the specific application service outage at a glance, greatly reducing the time required to respond to the failure" — Case Study Participant, Corporate Platform Unit Infrastructure Operations Group, SHIFT
ABOUT SHIFT
SHIFT Inc. supports the entire software product/service process, from software quality assurance and testing to planning, development, security, system performance improvement, and UI/UX design and marketing consulting. They employ talented people with business knowledge and technical skills in a variety of industries and business sectors, and together with more than 30 group companies with different areas of expertise, they provide services ranging from mission-critical core systems for financial institutions and other enterprises to e-commerce sites, applications for smartphones, and game testing. They provide services that contribute to “creating services that sell” to customers in a wide range of industries, and their business is expanding rapidly, with 10,000 employees in the group.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
SHIFT Inc. selected SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor as the observability and operational monitoring solutions for the IT systems supporting the foundation of their rapidly growing business. The company monitors over 700 servers and network devices and more than 50 software-as-a-service (SaaS) and internal applications.
The company has been satisfied with the observability benefits they’ve realized with SolarWinds products.
INTRODUCTION
SHIFT has over 10,000 employees and continues to expand. A team of five people is responsible for planning, building, and operating the company-wide system infrastructure. As the company dealt with an increase in new employees and the launch of new sites, they identified issues with conventional system infrastructure monitoring, and they selected SolarWinds to solve these concerns. The following is a review of the challenges and their decision to use a monitoring solution.
Challenges in system monitoring
- Internal users frequently notify SHIFT about network or server problems. If the response is delayed, it may affect business operations.
- Although SHIFT analyzes the logs of each device and application to determine the cause of the failure, it sometimes took a long time to clarify the root cause. In some cases, they couldn’t identify the cause even after the event occurred.
- As the company’s use of SaaS services expands, the number of inquiries from users increases. Investigating and isolating problems when they occur is difficult. With an eye on business expansion, the company wants to plan for future network development but isn’t sufficiently able to analyze trends in communication data volume.
Monitoring solution requirements
SHIFT had a list of requirements to consider when selecting their monitoring solutions. Though some requirements were simple, their area of work required specific considerations in certain circumstances. Here are some of the company’s requirements when considering monitoring solutions:
- Dead/alive device monitoring, status monitoring, and log management and monitoring
- The ability to monitor the traffic status of the entire network, the traffic status of each node, and the latency status of the network
- Detailed data monitoring of CPU, memory, and disk resources and service and process monitoring
- Ability to easily monitor the route to cloud services (SaaS) and isolate whether problems occur inside or outside the company
- Appropriate cost of product licenses for the rapid increase in the number of monitoring targets associated with the company’s growth
- High-quality vendor maintenance support and periodic surveillance system health check services
- Maps functionality enabling integrated management of network, server, and wireless devices at all company locations from a single screen
- Full-stack observability functionality
- Ability to predict the future based on trend and correlation analysis and ability to monitor efficiently with AIOps functionality in the future
Monitoring solutions considered and their deficiencies
- Product A had support concerns and operational cost issues related to compiling management information bases (MIBs) of network devices
- Product B required knowledge of Python® and JSON, and some of the monitoring functions—mainly for network devices—didn’t meet their requirements
- Product C didn’t have functionality for monitoring network routes to cloud services
- Product D had cost issues related to compiling MIBs
- Product E didn’t fit the budget and had a high operational load
WHY CHOOSE SOLARWINDS?
After making inquiries to individual network monitoring software manufacturers and comparing features, SHIFT found SolarWinds was capable of meeting their product selection requirements.
For SHIFT, the solution needed to be easy for anyone to use and set up monitoring targets. It also had to allow them to monitor routes to cloud services and perform trend and correlation analysis of monitored targets so they could perform the analysis necessary for future infrastructure design.
SHIFT also excluded open-source products with frequently changing product specifications and manufacturers with poor support services to maintain their small team while expanding their business.
ACHIEVEMENTS IN IT OPERATIONS AND MONITORING AFTER IMPLEMENTATION
SHIFT has already realized many benefits from implementing SolarWinds products.
Monitoring objectives and installation types
Object of Monitoring | Number of objects |
Network/Server Equipment | 680/20 |
Application | 20 |
Cloud Service (SaaS) | 30 |
*30 MAPs created and in use
BENEFITS
SHIFT monitors more than 700 servers and network devices nationwide and over 50 SaaS and in-house applications.
The SolarWinds dashboard allows for integrated management of all locations nationwide on a single map, and they can immediately check any problems by drilling down from the map to determine the cause and take countermeasures. And since no special knowledge is required to add monitoring targets, they can easily monitor equipment from various manufacturers,and the system can easily accommodate future system and site expansions.
The NetPath
function SolarWinds offers visualizes the path from a location to a SaaS service, making it possible to detect SaaS service failures early and determine whether the problem lies within the company or with the telecommunications carrier or service provider, which is essential in the current IT environment. NetPath also makes it possible to trace back and understand the status of problems related to SaaS services, which are often difficult to investigate because they’re frequently resolved before they become a problem. When expanding or changing the system, SHIFT is now able to present evidence and numerical data related to problems, enabling them to communicate more constructively with management than ever before.
SHIFT is confident they can monitor networks, servers, and applications in a hybrid environment of on-premises and cloud computing from a single screen to ensure stable operation.
ACTUAL RESULTS
“We had a Microsoft 365 outage that caused us to lose connection to email and chat,” the case study participant said. “In such cases, because the NetPath functionality was monitoring the routes, we were able to quickly notify users by checking NetPath from the dashboard, which showed that the problem was on the provider’s side. The initial response was completed in about 10 minutes, whereas previously, it would have taken several days to check the normality of the related equipment and contact the service provider.
“When problems occurred with the Active Directory to identity as a service (IDaaS) synchronization application,” they continued, “we had to scrutinize all the logs— network, server, and application—to identify the problem and get to the cause of the failure. But with the introduction of SolarWinds, we were able to identify the specific application service outage at a glance, greatly reducing the time required to respond to the failure.”
In summary, SolarWinds was the best choice for SHIFT because it is “easy to understand and simple to use.”
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Year Founded: 2005
Employees: 10,000
Product Mix:
- Network Performance Monitor
- Server & Application Monitor
