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How Visolit Unifies Hybrid-IT Monitoring with Opsview

Who is Visolit?

Visolit is a Norway-based international information technology operation, outsourcing and consultancy service company. The company offers flexible and scalable IT operations solutions suitable for small and medium enterprises, primarily in Norway and Sweden, and its manages IT operations on behalf of more than 1300 customers and in excess of 115,000 IT users. Based in Asker, Visolit has 650 employees.

Telecomputing datacenter

We asked Thomas Wollen, Visolit's NOC manager, why he selected Opsview Monitor:

What monitoring tools were you using before Opsview?

Before Opsview we used two well known, legacy monitoring platforms. Unfortunately, both tools flooded us with alarms and suffered from persistent database instability. The decision was made to look for something new when it was decided to centralize monitoring from all locations into one tool. The old monitoring tools couldn’t hope to scale with the rapid growth Visolit is experiencing.

What were the main reasons you selected Opsview?

Having battled with the limitations of our old monitoring tools for a number of years we had a long list of requirements from the replacement including:

  • Single, unified MSP monitoring platform – with datacenters in multiple locations, different teams used different monitoring tools which lead to inconsistent service levels. Our goal was to centralize our hybrid IT monitoring activities in one location with just one tool.
  • Orchestrator / Collector functionality – this was crucial to allow us to also centralize the monitoring of offshore customer sites.
  • Multi-tenancy – we wanted to allow our users to create their own hosts and choose how they want to monitor them.
  • Cloud-scale – we needed a tool that could comfortably handle to 20,000+ hosts and scale further as required.
  • Up to 24/7 support – we needed a monitoring vendor that could provide us with expert support in our timezone. That wasn’t the case with the incumbent vendors.

After downloading Opsview we quickly realised it met all of our technical requirements. But beyond Opsview doing what we needed it to do, we were very impressed by the helpful and persistent sales contact we had from Opsview. They really understood our scaling challenges, both technical and commercial, and went the extra mile to accommodate us. It’s really easy to do business with Opsview.

How easy was it to get started with Opsview?

Installing and getting started with Opsview is easy, but moving the data from the closed nature of our existing monitoring systems was a big challenge due to the number of objects we had to manually migrate, organise and fine tune. We knew migrating was going to be challenging but Opsview AND the team at Opsview have helped us build a much more robust monitoring system, with more enterprise features (we particularly love bulk edit!) and much greater potential for extensibility than before.

Bulk Edit

How have you found working with the Opsview Team?

We have been very impressed with everyone in the Opsview team. They’re always quick to respond, polite and very skilled. We trust Opsview and the team behind it – that’s essential for us.

How has Opsview helped you achieve your business goals?

We have over 20,000 hosts monitored in Opsview now and, at this moment, have only 6 unattended alerts. Compared to before that’s amazing. Confidence was so low using the old monitoring tools that the team didn’t know how to prioritize their response to alerts. Sometimes alerts would stay red for 6 to 7 hours. With Opsview we’re now able to deal with alerts when they happen and sometimes even before! An added bonus is that, because we have much greater confidence in our network observability with Opsview, we’re doing a much better job at setting the service level expectations of our customers. They’re happier because they know we will fix issues within a SLA we can commit too.

What specific metrics can you share about the impact it has had?

The impact of Opsview has been extraordinary. With the old tools we had so little confidence in the KPIs they produced that we just ignored them. That’s certainly not the case anymore. We have all the insight we need to present our performance metrics with confidence to management.

What opportunities do you see for further expansion of Opsview?

Going forward, the big push for us is providing technical expertise and support for our customers use of Microsoft’s Azure public cloud and reselling their on-premise version - AzureStack. We’ll look to include Opsview as part of these services.

 

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