Company Profile
Burlington Coat Factory (BCF) is a national department store retail chain that offers current, high-quality designer merchandise at prices up to 60% below those at other department stores. Burlington Coat Factory stores feature a wide variety of merchandise, including coats, apparel, shoes, accessories, baby clothes, furniture, toys, home décor items, and gifts. The chain has over 433 stores that can be found in 44 states nationwide.
Business Needs
BCF was considering significant software enhancements to help facilitate the quick identification of retail trends, improve merchandise allocation within the retail locations, support customer needs, and more rapidly respond to emerging markets. To successfully support these business efforts, effective and efficient monitoring of the enterprise-wide infrastructure was deemed critical.
The Challenge
BCF had historically used a number of “home-grown” system monitoring scripts as directed point solutions. The company was looking for a comprehensive software solution to meet three primary goals. The first goal was to consolidate monitoring across heterogeneous operating systems as well as integrate specific process services. A second goal was the timely notification of the appropriate technical personnel, allowing a faster mean time to repair. The third goal was budgetary in nature—a fiscally responsible solution while ensuring a high level of software reliability.
Why Nagios?
Implementing Nagios as a monitoring solution proved to be an ideal match for BCF’s goals. BCF system administrators used the concept of rapid application development and deployment (RADD) to focus on global concerns first (i.e., monitoring across platforms and technical support notifications). BCF is currently monitoring over 1,700 hosts and 3,000 services with Nagios. Additional uses for Nagios are identified as IT team members continue to gain more experience with it.
The Bottom Line
Nagios has provided Burlington Coat Factory with the information and visibility necessary to fully execute proactive information support management services. Nagios’ granularity enables monitoring of multiple points of failure for a single application. It supports rapid and pointed notification of problems to “on-call” administrators. This allows administrators to correct a single point of failure within a process before total failure. As a result of implementing Nagios, BCF has noticed a marked decrease in downtime.
