CASE STUDY
The challenge
Customer satisfaction is absolutely key to
OST’s success but was difficult to secure
without comprehensive insight into its
clients’ IT environments. The MSP has a
relatively small customer base of large
organisations in sectors as diverse as
healthcare and manufacturing – each of
which may be running between 1,000 –
10,000+ servers. This required effective
IT operations monitoring and automated
response covering a diverse range of legacy
and digital environments, so that OST can
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crucially identify and resolve issues before the
customer even knows something is wrong.
Another challenge was the breadth of
different client systems OST needed to
support. These include: AS400, mainframes,
OpenVMS and other decades-old but mission-
critical systems; a dozen different on-premises
storage system brands; and cloud-native
application infrastructure. Another important
factor in OST’s decision over which IT
Operations Management (ITOM) provider
to partner with was its adoption of Site
Reliability Engineering (SRE).
This Google-developed methodology aims
to create highly scalable, ultra-reliable IT
infrastructure, requiring a high degree of
automation in IT monitoring and is now the
core element used by major cloud providers
to run their organisations.
Scalability and support
OST initially chose to partner with Opsview a
decade ago, with a free version of its ITOM
tool. As the company grew, it migrated over
to Opsview Monitor Enterprise, which added
support and extra modular features such as
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