The Challenge
After years of adding new monitoring tools to keep up with its growth, one of Malaysia’s top five banks found itself hampered by a complicated, incompatible network that was time-consuming to manage and maintain. Because the bank wasn’t able to move all its data into one central place, IT staff spent considerable time collecting and consolidating this information. The bank’s monitoring system wasn’t compatible with new technology and lacked the powerful features and customization needed to operate efficiently.
The bank had been using several dozen monitoring tools, which led to a loss in productivity for the overwhelmed IT staff. Collecting and consolidating all the data from the various monitoring solutions required a lot of time and constant communication between employees.
Astiostech Sdn. Bhd. was the enterprise solution provider tasked with finding a solution for the bank. Fortunately, the best fit came to mind quickly.
“Our client had quite a few monitoring tools, and they couldn’t find a single solution to replace them all. It was a challenge to consolidate everything they had. This is where Nagios XI came in to provide the consolidation that allowed them to put all their monitoring information into one platform,” said Alfred Chong, director for Astiostech.
With Nagios XI, the bank’s IT staff found they could seamlessly take control of their entire environment in one compatible, centralized solution with the automation opportunities necessary to make the most of their team’s time.
“The manual work of extracting information has been automated with help from Nagios XI, giving them back hours of free time each week,” said Alfred Chong, Director, Astiostech.
IT Staff Monitors Entire Ecosystem Through One Centralized System
The bank decided a full replacement of its monitoring system was needed. Replacing entire IT systems can be a long, arduous, and risky process, but deploying Nagios XI was a breeze. Because Nagios XI is built for compatibility, system administrators were easily able to transition their entire environment from multiple monitoring tools to one cohesive solution.
Equipped with a centralized view and a simplified workflow, IT staff are now able to work more efficiently and collaboratively with each other. With tons of information available at a glance, they can focus on other key tasks rather than manually collecting and trying to interpret data from multiple sources. Plus, the bank is saving money by only having to pay for one monitoring system.
The Team Makes Data-Informed Decisions While Avoiding Alarm Fatigue
With the advanced customization available in Nagios XI, the bank’s IT team can customize alerts, avoid alarm fatigue, and easily gain the information they need to make business decisions.
“I think the key feature that Nagios XI presented to us is the ability for us to customize it for exactly what was needed,” Chong said.
The system the bank was replacing had limited alert features and often required manual intervention to resolve issues. But with Nagios XI, IT staff can set up alerts for specific, urgent situations. The UI was easily customized to display the information the bank needed most frequently to make business decisions in real time. In addition, Event Handlers in Nagios XI can respond to some incidents automatically without the need for human involvement.
The team has also benefited from other features missing in their old system:
- Auto-populated graphs for monitored metrics that help in capacity planning to project the need for future resources
- Custom query capabilities that enable the extension of monitoring and the ability to query almost anything from the database
- Plugins with custom parameters that allow narrow alert filtering and more targeted notifications, such as the ability to send notifications to specific teams
- Filtering of unwanted notifications, enabling the end user to focus on only business-critical alerts
Positioned for Long-Term Success
For one of Malaysia’s top five banks, staff have been able to save time and focus their energy thanks to a compatible system that offers the centralized view, powerful features, and customization they had been lacking.
Alarm thresholds have been set, so anytime an alarm does go off, staff members know that an urgent situation needs to be addressed. And by implementing automation, they have drastically cut down on how often they need to respond to an issue because they can rely on Nagios XI to help correct situations without human intervention. Utilizing consolidation and powerful customizability from Nagios XI, this IT team has positioned themselves for long-term IT success.
