Ascham School Transitions Seamlessly to Remote Learning and Increases Team Productivity by 60% With LogicMonitor

Challenge

Established in 1886, Ascham School in Sydney is one of Australia’s oldest girls schools. Ascham provides high-quality education for day and boarding students driven by a strong and respected academic program from Prep to Year 12. Ascham is highly innovative and utilises many technologies to support the School’s fast-paced learning environment and unique Dalton Plan.

Ascham’s IT team had been using a costly third-party service to monitor its infrastructure and provide support for their firewalls, networks, switches and links. The IT team also used a dated on-premises monitoring tool that provided little insight into what was happening in their infrastructure.

Without proper insight into their infrastructure, identifying and troubleshooting issues was time-consuming. Unnecessary network tickets were created, and there were over 500 live alerts at a time. The IT team also wasn’t able to pull data to create reports and dashboards, resulting in low visibility of IT infrastructure issues within the school.

Solution

Anthony Barron, IT Operations Manager at Ascham School was familiar with LogicMonitor and led the selection process for a new monitoring platform. “I knew the power of the LogicMonitor platform and the value it could provide, both on a technical level and a business level,” explained Barron. “My biggest reason for selecting LogicMonitor is that I knew it could handle everything I threw at it.”

With LogicMonitor, Ascham is now able to efficiently monitor its network, firewalls, threat alerts, sixty printers across campus, and its helpdesk metrics.

Implementation was completed in under 48 hours, resulting in immediate benefits. “The fact that LogicMonitor is so easy to implement and use is a huge plus for me,” said Barron. “During the first hour, we had 40 network switches and firewalls being monitored. We were able to fix so many bad cables and interfaces that I lost count.”

Benefits

Ascham realised significant annual cost savings by moving from a third-party service provider to LogicMonitor. Ascham has also seen a noticeable increase in productivity since implementing the LogicMonitor platform. In the first three months of using LogicMonitor, team productivity increased by 60%, and many long-standing issues were identified and quickly resolved. Due to greater insight into its infrastructure, preventative maintenance is now targeted and Ascham has seen a 50% drop in infrastructure-related network tickets.

Ascham’s IT team is now able to spot issues right as they happen. Previously, it took 30 minutes to an hour to identify an issue. “I sleep better at night and my time in the office is more productive because I’m not troubleshooting an issue and jumping down a rabbit hole,” said Barron. “I can see where things are right away and dedicate my time elsewhere as needed.”

The amount of alerts has also significantly decreased since using LogicMonitor. Ascham had over 500 critical, error, and warning alerts combined, most of which had the capacity to cause widespread outages if left to get worse. With LogicMonitor, the number of alerts is now down to 40. “We still have errors and warnings now occasionally, as does any environment, but thanks to LogicMonitor showing us what we need to fix or improve our infrastructure has never performed better,” said Barron.

Now that issues are more easily detected, LogicMonitor’s dashboards have been instrumental in providing a visual representation to other campus departments. Ascham’s IT department has been able to secure additional budget by providing metrics that prove their firewall was at capacity, access points and switches needed to be replaced, and VoIP traffic needed to be prioritized. “LogicMonitor has allowed me to have the data at my fingertips to push for network upgrades and reallocation of budgeting in areas in which I would not have known existed,” said Barron.

With the recent shift to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students and teachers rely on Office 365 to stay connected, and keeping its infrastructure up and running has become even more critical for Ascham. “LogicMonitor allows me to keep our learning platforms running smoothly, whether that be on-campus teaching and learning or now more than ever, remote learning,” explained Barron. Using LogicMonitor to improve the performance, stability, and reliability of the infrastructure and speed up response times directly translates into a more stable platform for the teachers to deliver their education, allowing students to better absorb the knowledge and learn.

“LogicMonitor has allowed us to identify and resolve infrastructure issues more quickly, which has vastly improved reliability and performance,” concluded Barron. “It gives us the time back to focus on improvements, projects, and support to our teachers and students. I truly believe LogicMonitor is enabling better learning here at Ascham.”