Gravesham Borough Council

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Data Integration enabled Gravesham Borough Council to perform more comprehensive monitoring and management of its network without breaking the bank by installing DI Live monitoring appliance. The solution has consolidated the council's existing network management applications whilst provided additional functionality and reporting.

A growing district

Gravesham Borough Council employs around 650 staff and delivers a range of services such as planning, environmental health, housing, leisure, waste management and emergency planning for nearly 96,000 residents in North Kent .

Gravesham forms part of Kent Thameside, an area earmarked by the government as a priority region for longterm sustainable economic, social and environmental regeneration. These ambitious plans include a wellpublicised vision from Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott for 30,000 new homes and 60,000 new jobs in the area.

The importance of the network

The council has come to rely upon its network more and more, so the need to maximise network uptime and performance has become more acute.

Darren Everden, Network Manager at Gravesham Borough Council, is responsible for ensuring that the network is optimised to support the critical applications that help the council deliver high quality services to its citizens.

During Darren's time at Gravesham he has seen the network grow in size and complexity. In order to facilitate the smooth running of the network, two monitoring tools had been implemented; a proprietary switch management application and an SNMP monitor.

Whilst these tools improved the team's understanding of the network dynamics, Darren felt that they were not fully meeting his needs. The SNMP monitor was OK, but did not provide much flexibility, and our switch management application was located on a separate server. On top of that we needed to monitor our technical support knowledge base, so there were three systems that we had to keep an eye on. This was timeconsuming and cumbersome not the most efficient way to manage our resources.

In addition to the practical problems of monitoring network performance with these disparate tools, the council's increased focus on performance indicators meant that Darren needed to be able to provide summary information about key IT metrics, but he had no integrated way of doing this.

It was at this time that Data Integration suggested its DI Live appliance as a solution to Darren's network monitoring frustrations.

A rapid rollout

After a series of technical demonstrations and presentations from Data Integration, Darren felt confident that DI Live could meet all of his requirements: I could instantly see the benefits of consolidating these separate systems into a single view, and the improved visibility of long term trends reported by the system would help me measure and benchmark some of my key performance indicators.

With the functionality of the solution proven, Data Integration set about a consultation exercise to understand exactly what Gravesham's IT team wanted to monitor with the system. Once this had been defined Data Integration preconfigured the system to this specification in a test environment so that the appliance could be dropped into the network with minimal configuration or disruption.

Once the appliance was installed Data Integration helped the Gravesham team to carry out the necessary configuration of devices to be monitored so that they would send data back to the DI Live appliance.

The whole process took just four weeks. Darren comments: It was a remarkably quick rollout, especially taking into consideration that Data Integration carried out a lot of custom configuration to ensure that the system would exactly meet our needs.

More functionality

Following the installation, Darren and his team immediately started to see the benefits of the new system: The Live Monitoring function in DI Live provides much more granular monitoring of devices. For example, we can specify dependant groups' so, for instance, we can tell the system not to check the web server if the router in front of it is down because we already know it will be inaccessible. This reduces the number of false positive' alerts we have to deal with. We can also perform some advanced monitoring, such as checking a web page for a particular text string to validate the operation of our backend content management system, or ensuring that our web site hasn't been hacked and defaced rather than simply checking whether the web server is up'.

In addition to providing improved monitoring functionality the system has enabled the council to consolidate two other tools. First, the proprietary software that is used to manage the core network switches and second, the technical support knowledge base. This means that there's one straightforward interface from which all IT staff can access the essential information we need to do our jobs effectively, adds Darren.

Instant benefits

Extolling the virtues of the system, Darren says: We are using DI Live to monitor all of our servers, routers to remote sites, routers to the Internet, our core network switches and our public web site. We are also using the traffic monitoring facilities to log the usage of our leased lines and, in particular, to ensure our main Internet leased line has sufficient bandwidth available to keep our web site on the air. This is proving useful for the statistics we need to keep on our web site availability, and will also be a good yardstick to measure our service providers by should we wish to change them in the future.

Improved operational efficiency

Gravesham Borough Council has seen a number of operational efficiencies since implementing the system:

• Network resources can be managed more proactively so there are fewer near miss' situations. Systems can be upgraded or fixed before they start to cause any major problems.
• Having better visibility of what's happening on the network allows for better planning and allocation of resources.
• Consolidating a number of separate systems and screens into a single view and reducing the number of false positives' minimises wasted time switching between systems and trying to diagnose problems.
• The system is webbased and very intuitive to use, so minimal staff training is required and benefits of the system are quickly realised.

Cost effective

The DI Live appliance closes the gap between point monitoring tools that are cheaply available but that do not necessarily give an integrated picture of network health and largescale enterprise management solutions which can be costly, timeconsuming and complex to use.

Darren concludes, There are more sophisticated network monitoring solutions available than DI Live , but at the end of the day that is not what we wanted both from a time and cost perspective. We were looking for a cost effective solution that would give us more flexibility and more customisable monitoring than could be achieved with the separate tools we had used in the past. In this environment DI Live has exceeded our expectations.

For further information please contact your Data Integration Account Manager on +44(0)20 8875 6500 or email info@dataintegration.com

For further information about Gravesham Borough Council visit www.gravesham.gov.uk

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