Network Alliance Uses dopplerVUE to Assure Performance in the Cloud

“Before we started using dopplerVUE we found that a lot of alerts were going by the wayside,” explains Ted Brown, Manager of IT Services at Network Alliance. “In some cases we weren’t able to monitor effectively; in others we were monitoring too much. We were getting so much information that we were just saying, ‘OK, another alert on that again.’ We became immune to it.”
 “I thought we could be more proactive than reactive,” Brown says.

Being proactive is important to Network Alliance technicians because they take their service level agreements seriously.  The company is a unique kind of managed service provider that for 14 years has served as a complete outsourced IT department to its mid-sized and small business clients. Their solution employs a proprietary virtual desktop technology the company developed which allows users to access applications and services from anywhere.

“We manage our clients’ networks as well as their customized cloud computing environment,” explains Brown. This includes hosting, managing, securing and supporting everything from network devices to desktops, applications, servers and just about everything else. According to CEO, Don Britton, “We provide one-stop support for all things technical, including CIO services, help desk and technical specialists that these businesses usually couldn’t afford on their own. We focus on their IT so they can focus on their business.”

"The results are impressive. A perfect 100% of respondents to a recent client satisfaction survey said they were satisfied or very satisfied with Network Alliance as their IT provider and the company has maintained a 98% client retention rate since its founding."

“We want our clients to think of our service like the lights or water,” says Angela Suarez, Network Alliance’s Communications Manager. “Whenever they turn it on, everything works effectively and  dependably, whether it’s network connectivity, email services, Microsoft Office or a back office accounting application.”

That’s why Brown wants to be as proactive as possible. “With so many people and businesses depending upon us, five nines availability (that is, 99.999%) doesn’t satisfy us. We always want more nines. You can never have too many nines.”

Email is one area Network Alliance pays special attention to because it is a lifeblood service for many clients, especially the mid-sized legal and accounting firms that represent a large part of their customer base. “We know that if some of our page pools on an email server get too high the Outlook Web Access (OWA) service will fail. With dopplerVUE I can now see those conditions developing. We know what is about to happen and can prevent it.”

Bandwidth is another frequent issue. If a client is running out of bandwidth, things slow down for everyone in that office, which means support calls go up. “With dopplerVUE,” Brown explains, “We have things set up to send us an alert if the response time goes above  100ms. We can quickly hunt down the issue using the Bandwidth Troubleshooter and proactively make a call to the client first to say, ‘Hey, Joe in the back corner is sucking up a lot of bandwidth. Is that OK?’”

As both NOC and IT helpdesk, Network Alliance keeps three widescreen TVs in the center of the operations room, one constantly showing the latest, most pressing alerts sent from dopplerVUE so everyone can see them and react quickly.  The team uses dopplerVUE’s enterprise-grade features to improve performance, such as writing alarming rules that reflect actual service conditions.

“It was easy to customize alerts and reports to prioritize major issues,” says Brown. “For example, we have many physical servers, none of them set up exactly the same way. Memory utilization percentages are slightly different so that one server might be OK as high as 90%, but another gets into trouble at only 40%. Before dopplerVUE, we’d frequently get standardized alerts that just didn’t matter. Now when I see an alert come up I know I have to do something.”

Network Alliance technicians have been using dopplerVUE since 2008 to be more proactive in watching over their IT infrastructure, from switches and routers to firewalls, servers and more.  According to Brown, “It tells us if network utilization is getting too high or when a server is getting a certain degree of latency. We can look into a firewall to keep the queue short, seeing their length on a daily or weekly basis.” One advantage has been that dopplerVUE has allowed Network Alliance to go from using four separate tools for managing alerts to one, making it easier to pinpoint and fix problems quickly.

Like many other companies, Network Alliance is making increasing use of server virtualization, in their case moving to a Hyper-V model. “As we progress,” says Brown, “I’m confident that dopplerVUE will continue to help us be more proactive and effective there as well. “ Once again, we’ll just take the key metrics we want to monitor and put them straight into dopplerVUE. It will allow me to fine tune, optimize and proactively monitor growing problems before they cause real trouble. I want everything operating perfectly. Or at least to as many nines as possible. “

For Network Alliance, dopplerVUE helps: 

 
• Focus on critical and major conditions by effectively filtering out nominal alerts.
 
• Reduce cost and confusion by replacing four tools with one.
 
• Decrease the volume of help desk calls by proactively addressing concerns before they become full-scale problems affecting service quality.
 
• Integrate and manage new technologies introduced into the network.