XConnect Monitoring Case Study

XConnect is the world's leading provider of intelligent federation based interconnection and registry services driving the adoption of IP multimedia communications. XConnect enables their customers to capitalize on their network and technology investments through enabling the delivery of IP voice, video and unified communications across disparate networks and platforms.

The Need for Opsview

As a VoiP company XConnect needed to extensively monitor their complex IT estate and were looking to implement a one stop solution. They also had further requirements to make additional customization to the product therefore they needed a fully flexible solution. The solution would replace Big Brother, Ganglia, and Cacti, but also needed to provide them with end to end monitoring which tracked routers, hardware and the whole IT estate.

Having looked at a variety of monitoring solutions, it was apparent that they required a solution that was flexible enough to build from and to enable them to make further changes where necessary as nothing ‘off the shelf’ met their requirements.

XConnect are comprised of 4 primary and 3 secondary sites. The primary sites have their own monitoring clusters with a total of 250 devices and network servers combined, with approximately 10,000 service checks, 1,800 of these per minute.

Being a 24/7 operation, downtime is not an option; if an issue arises this must be responded to and dealt with immediately.

XConnect compared Solarwinds, Centreon, Zenos and Nagios XI to Opsview Enterprise. The benefit of being built on an underlying framework of Nagios and the ability to use and access the Nagios exchange library and community plug-ins within Opsview Enterprise was key. Additionally, other solutions could not provide redundant slave clustering, which was a big concern as they have a zero downtime requirement.

Originally an Opsview community user, XConnect understood the need to customize their solution and realizing the value of Opsview Enterprise, they sought approval from management to purchase. Once this was obtained they proceeded to upgrade.

Deployment and Result 

The installation of Opsview Enterprise was quick and easy, but due to the customization required for in depth customer checks there was additional development carried out to get the product running to the standard required including custom development, custom monitoring and components programmed to speak their own language.

Opsview provided XConnect with the ability to track a lot more information; they were able to set up new tests which enabled quick detection and resolution to any issues before they were able to make an impact to the business. This enabled a proactive response and the ability to compose event correlation information.

Partners are much happier as they have a more detailed view; they are experiencing fewer issues and can spot a potential problem earlier which also means they have less people on call.

“For a true production environment if you’re serious about monitoring you need to have reliability, scalability and intelligence. The foundations for Opsview are solid, it provides you with all the tools required to let you do exactly what you need to do.” Noah Guttman, Systems Engineer at XConnect Global Networks Ltd