Company Profile
Sweden-based Rely IT delivers innovative and cost-effective IT solutions for companies throughout Europe. From managing an office’s entire IT network to custom-built software and systems integration services, Rely IT helps customers stay focused on core business offerings instead of IT issues.
The Challenge
Rely IT needed a flexible, powerful IT monitoring and alerting solution to better manage its customers’ needs. “We were using a solution that was expensive and clunky to scale,” said Kenneth Hagstrom, co-founder of Rely IT. “I’d been aware of Nagios for nearly 20 years, and we decided to make the switch to Nagios. Its solutions perfectly fit our business needs.”
Why Nagios?
Rely IT leverages both Nagios Core and Nagios XI for their business needs and customer circumstances. “We use Nagios Core for simple installations where the customer just needs basic monitoring and some email alerts,” explained Hagstrom. “But for our own monitoring needs and our more robust customers, we use Nagios XI.”
Nagios Core is open-source IT monitoring software that was ground-breaking in its early years. But as IT infrastructure and business needs became more complex, a new software solution was needed. Something that could help IT professionals work more strategically and proactively and was more intuitive to use.
With graphs and reports, customizable dashboards, an integrated database, a backend API, multi-tenancy, wizards, and more, Nagios XI far exceeds anything Core can do in terms of usability and speed. Nagios XI empowers system administrators to work faster and smarter with a complete monitoring, alerting, graphing, and reporting solution.
“We’re the ones calling the customer to tell them their internet is down before they even know it. Or we call to say we’re sending over someone to fix their printer, and they hadn’t realized it was down yet. We have a great reputation of handling everything for customers, and Nagios is a big part of that.” – Kenneth Hagstrom, co-founder, Rely IT
The Results
Lower Costs, Higher Speeds, and Staying Five Steps Ahead
Rely IT says that while Nagios XI has impacted many areas of customers’ businesses, three major benefits stand out.
Detailed reports save money
Nagios XI’s reports and capabilities help Rely IT offer customers even more value. “As a consultancy and service provider, it’s up to us to imagine what our customers can monitor. Nagios XI gives us inspiration for what’s possible,” explained Hagstrom. “We really appreciate the graphs, pre-sets, and configuration inserts. Our customers love the reporting because we can customize the reports for what they need. They have very high expectations of the detail they want to see in Nagios reports.”
Details matter to Rely IT customers, including one of the largest ferry companies in Sweden that shuttles 30,000 daily commuters. Rely IT monitors everything from the amount of paper in ticketing machines to the cameras that read passengers’ vehicle license plates to payment processes.
“We have saved the company a lot of money because they have full control of their business system,” said Hagstrom. “IT has to work for them from early morning to late at night. Our team has created a lot of customized solutions for them, and Nagios supports everything that executes our plugins.”
Faster Setup with the Nagios Cross-Platform Agent
The Nagios Cross Platform Agent (NCPA) runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, and Mac OS/X machines. Its features include both active and passive checks, remote management, and a local monitoring interface. By using NCPA, Rely IT can write checks directly from the plugin and get examples of what to monitor.
“NCPA gives us simplicity,” noted Hagstrom. “It’s easier to monitor what we need to monitor. I’m personally not that great at writing code or programming, but even I can make good monitoring examples and plugins! I wish we had started using NCPA sooner.”
Five Steps Ahead of the Customer
Proactive issue resolution is another area in which Rely IT shines with the help of Nagios XI. “We are one step ahead of the errors—sometimes five steps ahead!” said Hagstrom. Rely IT monitors customer details and usage, which allows them to plan for capacity changes that keep customers running smoothly and head off problems before they start.
