eG Enterprise gives us the opportunity to be proactive. It makes sure that we have a grip on our IT infrastructure to ensure the best possible IT environment for our end users.
When issues occur, we get accurate and actionable insights on how to solve those issues fast without the need to spend extra effort, money, and time on hiring the right consultants for this!
Key Benefits
- For the IT teams - They get direct insights into the health status of their combined IT environment. They get a lot of trend-based information, which helps them by spotting alerts in the environment even before issues start occurring. eG Enterprise not only shows relevant alerts per department (network/application, etc.), but also depicts the correlation between these departments.
- For the 800+ end users - End users benefit the most out of eG Enterprise because now, the IT teams can be proactive in finding issues and resolving them much quicker than they did before. This ensures that end users can effectively work on their applications and access their systems anytime.
- For gemeente Heerhugowaard & Langedijk - eG Enterprise gave the IT teams more time to be involved with improving the IT infrastructure with less downtime and issues. Their IT teams' efficiency has increased a lot. Before implementing eG Enterprise, they had to hire a lot of IT Consultants for issue investigation, diagnosis, and resolution, which is not required now.
Why eG Enterprise?
- The availability of IT systems and apps for their end users (employees) and citizens has improved a lot.
- eG Enterprise has provided IT administrators with more time to improve the IT landscape instead of only troubleshooting issues and fixing them.
- eG Enterprise has provided considerable cost savings by reducing the number of IT consultants they needed to hire. This, in turn, has reduced a lot of fixed expenses in their IT budget.
- eG Enterprise provided them with end-to-end visibility throughout their IT infrastructure, going well beyond the basic metrics that WhatsUp Gold provided them. This enabled them to find the root cause of issues when (and even before) they impact the end users.
Location: The Netherlands
Vertical: Government
Their IT Infrastructure
To serve the local citizens better and on time, the gemeente Heerhugowaard & Langedijk's municipality's 800+ employees/end users rely on IT infrastructure built on 50+ servers (using supporting technologies, such as Citrix, SQL, hypervisors, storage, etc.) and services like O365.
The Context
In the summer of 2019, the entire IT organization started changing due to a merger between two local municipalities: gemeente Heerhugowaard and gemeente Langedijk, which will be called gemeente Dijk en Waard.
Both municipalities' IT environments were drastically different from each other and they decided to start from scratch with a completely new IT infrastructure for the merged local government organization.
Monitoring was a huge part of their requirement because of the growing IT infrastructure and complexity between the two different IT environments. The merger of the two local governments is due to be completed by 2022.
Their Major Challenges
- The major problem was that when IT issues occurred, end users could not access the local government's IT systems and applications needed for their daily operations. This implied that they were unable to serve citizens, who relied on the local government for passports, waste management, parking, etc.
- Their IT teams used to spend hours trying to determine what caused the problem when something was wrong and when end users complained. They had to analyze all their application components to determine where the problem was. For all these issues, they had experts for different application components, who only looked at their own silos. This caused further delays in problem resolution.
- They used WhatsUp Gold, but it provided very basic monitoring capabilities and did not give them the proper insights and diagnosis they needed. Besides resource monitoring, monitoring of applications was mainly focused on up/down monitoring. If an error occurred, the IT team had to investigate the different servers and various application components themselves. They were not using WhatsUp Gold as a tool to pinpoint or diagnose the issues but only to test basic availability of their servers and applications.
The Evaluation
When they started the merger of both local municipalities, a pan-European tender was published. They wanted to have an end-to-end infrastructure monitoring tool that would give them user experience insights across all their IT systems.
PQR, eG Innovation's channel partner in the Netherlands, won the tender.
Wietse Westerdijk Head of Cluster Automation - Werkorganisatie Langedijk en Heerhugowaard | Download Case Study »Their Future Plans
- They want to further explore eG Enterprise's capabilities, as they believe that with the right training and support on eG Enterprise, they can get more out of the tool.
- They believe that eG Enterprise is the best solution for them right now as it is helping them with the complexities involved in merging two different IT environments.
- By 2022, they will be ready with the IT infrastructure for the merged municipality, gemeente Dijk en Waard.
- They also want to move their entire backend infrastructure to the cloud; they want to transition from on-premises to the cloud. They believe that with eG Enterprise, they will be more in control of monitoring even after they move to the cloud.
Wietse Westerdijk Head of Cluster Automation - Werkorganisatie Langedijk en Heerhugowaard