Challenge
A healthcare leader in Australia and New Zealand, Bupa is committed to helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives. With 22,000 employees serving more than four million customers, the organization offers a broad range of services, including aged care and retirement, dental, optical, health insurance, and more.
Like most large healthcare organizations, Bupa relies on a vast network infrastructure to support its key operations. When the company completed a series of acquisitions in 2017, its IT team saw the need to streamline its network operations and save money. “There were a number of different tools across different organizations used for monitoring, so we wanted to consolidate them into a best fit, and alleviate some spend elsewhere, with an eye towards potentially doing the same thing across our other organizations,” said Luke Williams, Head of Service Management at Bupa.
LogicMonitor has enabled us to consolidate several disparate tools and get better insight into our services and applications. Even if a team does not have access to a specific monitoring tool, they can use LogicMonitor to monitor specific issues around websites.
Dennis Huynh Reporting and Monitoring Manager, Bupa
Solution
Bupa looked at several differentoptions and determined that the LogicMonitor Platform offered the best combination of efficiency and cost savings.
“We did a bit of research and considered suggestions from previous people we had worked with, then we built a proof of concept based on our requirements,” said Williams. “LogicMonitor was the best fit for what we were trying to achieve. It was the only solution that enabled us to not only consolidate but also reduce costs.”
Bupa deployed its monitoring solution across two main data centers, to monitor approximately 900 on-premises devices in conjunction with its Microsoft Azure cloud services. The IT team was able to quickly consolidate three of its existing tools, including Cacti Network Monitoring, Nagios, and SolarWinds IT Monitoring. LogicMonitor’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering made it fast and easy to ramp up the solution. “Having a SaaS-based solution made it easy to interface, and the collectors were simple to deploy,” said Dennis Huynh, Reporting and Monitoring Manager at Bupa. “From an internal perspective, this allowed us to reach out to our network across various regions throughout the country. We added about 500 devices in 30 minutes, then spent a few days tuning the solution to provide correct level of the thresholds we needed.”
Bupa also integrated LogicMonitor with its ServiceNow Event Management module, and is exploring expanding the integration with its configuration management database (CMDB). After installing the solution, Bupa focused on educating its IT teams across the organization on how to make the most of the solution. “Our main focus was on educating the users on the structure of how the devices were deployed,” said Huynh. “From there, teams quickly picked it up and understood it. We set up filters so people could focus on their areas and devices, and assigned a champion to work with each support team to assist with adoption.”
With LogicMonitor, we have been able to successfully integrate and automate a lot of the incident creation and flag issues faster. The teams are now able to respond correctly, using the better processes, instead of spending time manually creating incidents.
Dennis Huynh Reporting and Monitoring Manager, Bupa
Benefits
Consolidating disparate monitoring tools under LogicMonitor has quickly helped Bupa streamline its operations, automate time-consuming processes, and improve IT efficiency. Now there’s less need for IT professionals to switch between tools to gain insight into issues, and spot problems that could impact the company’s services.
“With Nagios, a lot of the incident tracing was manually executed and verified, and then required additional tracking to find more information about issues,” said Huynh. “With LogicMonitor, we have been able to successfully integrate and automate a lot of the incident creation and flag issues faster. The teams are now able to respond correctly, using the better processes, instead of spending time manually creating incidents.”
The close integration between ServiceNow and LogicMonitor is also paying off for Bupa. Together, the tools augment one another to bring better visibility into the state of the infrastructure. “The ServiceNow Event Management module is the primary tool that we use to integrate process flows,” said Huynh. “We use LogicMonitor with it for discovery because of its ability to find detailed information about devices. The advantage is that we are able to utilise events from multiple monitoring tools that we have on premises, which allows us to correlate more data, and better track incidents.”
Bupa is now monitoring about 900 devices with LogicMonitor, and expects that number to increase to more than 1200 devices by the end of the year. Huynh and his team are also considering extending its features and capabilities to deliver more integration, automation, and efficiency. “Our primary integration is with ServiceNow, but we are actively discussing the possibility of extending the integration of LogicMonitor to other tools and processes over the next six to twelve months, to continue to improve our processes,” said Huynh.