When it comes to network monitoring all types of IT infrastructure ranging from consolidated to distributed workload conditions even the largest insurance company face challenges. Although, the organization gets access to a large human capital base, enjoys the trust & brand equity of millions of customers, and always has resources to immediately address its strategic concerns. But still to monitor the hybrid IT environment and get a comprehensive picture is in itself a challenge!

The company is India’s largest insurance firm, with over 400 branches in India. While this vast network helped the firm operate at a scale that made it approachable to practically every customer across the country, it also meant that its IT network was dense, complex, and humongous by all measures. The central issue was monitoring the performance and getting insights on over 2000 devices spread across the country’s 400+ branches.

Scalability Equals More Challenges in Monitoring and Uptime of Network Devices!

Before the firm decided to deploy Motadata, it was trying hard to catalogue all the challenges its vast network of geographically distributed devices posted. There were multitudes of problems and challenges pertinent to the firm’s IT Operations across the country.

Unavailability of getting insights via a single pane of glass view was the major concern. The management team did not have access to router uptimes across the country and hence couldn’t discover systemic problems in time. The firm also lacked access to real-time data. On top of this, the devices procured by different branches were sourced from different vendors. Hence, there was no uniformity in device performance data. As there was no real-time or even uniform data, the firm did not have any predictive analytics on network performance.

Even IT asset inventory was manually managed. All the changes, configurations, and new devices had to be manually entered in the central repository. Small data asymmetries would result in delayed device servicing and even expired licenses.

The firm tried an already existing solution to solve the problems and integrated third-party tools for timely notifications and alert-monitoring. That exacerbated the problems as the platform was giving false alerts.

Network uptime was critical to the firm’s operations and the firm was unable to optimize for it. Plus, the firm could not control the resources as it couldn’t get an end-to-end holistic view of metrics like service utilization As a result, the management team started thinking that it would not be possible to manage the IT operations within the firm without heavy capital expenditure.

Mitigating Downtime Issues: Improve Performance

On a first principle basis, the firm was lacking accurate information available at the right time. The data that was being reported was historical and did not provide the right context. The firm saw Motadata as a comprehensive solution to all these challenges.

The entire network had to be optimized primarily for one variable – uptime. The executive committee eventually selected Motadata as the solution because it came with a large set of features. The platform provided facilitated the comprehensive performance analytics covering different IT asset classes like hardware & server, Linux & Windows systems, virtual servers, databases, web-based servers, and applications.

All the information was available with contextual data that allowed the IT teams to easily perform Root Cause Analysis and evaluate correlations to unravel systemic issues. After deploying the platform, the immediate result was a dramatic drop in MTTR and a more seamless IT experience for both internal and external users.

Uptime Optimization with Insightful and Proactive Notifications.

Motadata’s monitoring platform helped the firm get incisive and timely access to its network data. The platform has been optimized to function seamlessly using 100+ pre-defined monitoring templates with OOB supports for leading vendors like Cisco, Radware, Checkpoint, and others, which generally supply the IT infrastructure’s critical components.

The Network Configuration Management module helped the IT team efficiently manage key configurations across each component in the entire network. Change request implementation was expedited. The IT team could resolve issues and upgrade & modify elements remotely.

The Motadata network monitoring platform comes with an auto-discovery feature that helped the lender include all the devices across geographies and IT asset types, without any manual input necessary. Now that all the devices were discovered, the platform enabled all key decision-makers to have detailed devices, applications, and server monitoring. The entire network was displayed with a dynamic topographical visualization that allowed the IT team to understand network relationships and dependencies across branches and devices with real-time L2 and L3 views.

The sophisticated alerts and reporting modules ensured no critical issue or problem was undetected. It automatically delivered emails, SMS, and messages across collaborative platforms like Slack, Hipchat, etc. as soon as the IT team configured threshold was breached.

Since all the data was collected, aggregated, and reported in real-time, the IT team was now equipped to perform deep Root Cause Analysis. The RCA lent the necessary context to all the data. This helped the IT team launch patches and solutions quickly and eliminated the possibility of undetected systemic issues turning into major IT problems.

Finally, the management team could now tap into immaculate visualizations that helped it understand and evaluate SLA management. Along with this, all the relevant technicians, managers, and process-owners were sent notifications with detailed reporting on key metrics. This helped the firm achieve continual service improvement across network, server, and applications. Moreover, the notifications were generated using the deep contextual insights that gave them predictive features, which helped the management team become more proactive.

Streamlining IT operations: Reduce Integration Complexities

The Motadata NMS platform integration unlocked value for the lending giant across different levels. The customizable dashboards ensured data was collected, processed, and aggregated from a large multitude of branches and devices across the nations.

The visualization, alerting, and reporting modules ensured that each IT team member and manager had access to the right data at the right time. The firm could move beyond analyzing past events and leverage actionable intelligence garnered from RCA. All the integrations worked fluidly, even with legacy systems, third-party systems, and various vendors’ supplies in the network. The IT team could focus on the strategic issues, since it was no longer supposed to manually update each component added, updated, or modified in the network. Even though the scale was huge, the IT team was supported by the authorization module that ensured end-to-end safety in the system.

The management team was able to attain a deep and informed perspective on the entire network. With the right resource allocation, monitoring, analysis, and proactive planning, the lender could eliminate nearly all unforeseeable downtime. In addition to this, the leadership understood the network’s performance in line with different policies and rules setup as the parameters and thresholds of the system.

Eventually, the firm witnessed a higher return on invested capital. It extracted optimal value out of each network element, even as it kept operating at a large scale across geographically distributed locations. To the management team’s utter and happy surprise, it achieved all of this with the cost-effective deployment of just one platform – Motadata.