Washington State Department of Commerce

The Washington State Department of Commerce is a government agency charged with creating and maintaining a strong and sustainable economic climate for the state of Washington, creating and improving jobs state-wide.

Keith Jewell, Network Administrator at WSDC, is responsible for the Windows servers, Active Directory and all WAN and LAN links in addition to the SAN and VMware environment at the Washington State Department of Commerce.

The Need for Opsview

Using a combination of Orion and SCCM, The Washington State Department of Commerce was monitoring over 100 hosts and over 500 services both at a central data center and at remote offices.

“Before Opsview we had two systems: external monitoring which alerted us while offsite, but only covered the most major of outages, and internal monitoring via SCCM which was far too detailed for regular use” Keith Jewell, Network Administrator at WSDC

Why Opsview?

Opsview was discovered while comparing various web interfaces for Nagios. WSDC’s network team determined that Opsview was the best fit for the organization when it came to ease of use, reliability, and completeness. With existing Nagios experience on staff, using Opsview meant the IT team could rapidly get familiar with Opsview with little additional training. With Opsview in place Washington State Department of Commerce was able to replace SCCM altogether and mostly replace Orion, saving money and reducing complexity

According to Jewell, “Opsview presented the most integrated and reliable product based on Nagios. Now we use it to monitor physical hosts, physical servers, virtual machines, storage, networking, application health, power conditions, and environmental conditions. For many of these, it gathers performance data in addition to monitoring availability and uptime.”

Deployment and Result 

Deploying Opsview was a smooth experience as WSDC’s staff could migrate their Nagios-based plugins, making the installa-tion and configuration of the environment quick and easy. Their original implementation made use of Opsview Community and the company was later able to migrate to Opsview Enterprise and has ultimately found a best fit with Opsview Pro,owing to its competitive pricing and feature-rich monitoring.

Commenting on the deployment, Jewell said: “The software product is generally excellent. Upgrades have been smooth and easy, with very few regressions.”

After rolling-out Opsview, the business has experienced an increase in uptime and more responsive reporting. This has contributed to an overall higher quality IT service. The Washington State Department of Commerce has found Opsview’s support to be responsive and knowledgeable.

“Before Opsview we often had to wait for user reports to know when a service outage occurred. Now we can call the customers and tell them we’re fixing a system before they even know that it’s down. Some of the warnings allow us to solve issues before they become outages”, explained Jewell.