“Without monitoring, you’re just talking about what you did. With monitoring, you can show what you did, show how it behaves, and show how it’s really working. You actually have something that can give an objective view of what’s really happening,” – Rich Johnston, Director, Hosting Platforms at Carrier.
Challenge:
Carrier Global Corporation is a global leader in building and cold chain solutions, developing healthy and safety products in three major segments including HVAC, Fire & Security, and Refrigeration. Carrier has over 80 brands with a widespread presence across 160 countries.
“The size of the company is really challenging. We need to easily identify any potential issues we might have across any of our 650 sites around the world,” said Ismael Villarreal, Sr. Manager, Hosting Platforms Operations at Carrier.
Carrier’s infrastructure was a mix of old and new, as they had recently spun away from a former parent company and were involved in multiple mergers and acquisitions. They’ve introduced many new architectures into their environment and still have legacy architectures in their factories that need to be removed.
“Our goals and initiatives at Carrier this year are to further streamline our environments from some recently implemented technologies, reduce our footprint in as many areas as possible in terms of tools, physical deployment of servers, compute platforms and to really drive cost out, but still help our business achieve our goals,” Johnston said.
Carrier was also looking to increase visibility into their growing hybrid environment, reduce MTTR, and proactively monitor their infrastructure through automation to identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible.
“We don’t want to wait for our customers to call us and complain that there’s a problem,” Johnston explained. “Ideally we’re getting ahead of it so our customers never have to call because we saw something occurring, were able to predict what would happen, and got our teams to react before the customer felt the pain.”
Solution:
LogicMonitor’s unified observability platform, LM Envision, allowed Carrier to have a single pane of glass view into their large, evolving infrastructure. This led to increased visibility and proactive monitoring to solve issues for their customers swiftly.
Carrier has been able to leverage its improved visibility in several challenging situations. One instance was when Microsoft released a patch that ended up temporarily taking out Carrier’s Active Directory environment.
They were able to utilize the visibility that LogicMonitor brought to their environment through the out-of-the-box Active Directory dashboard to help gain control faster and stay ahead of the issue, even when it took days for a fix from Microsoft to become available.
“We were able to give confidence to our executive leadership team that we knew what was going on and had a handle on what was happening,” Johnston said.
Carrier was also able to significantly reduce MTTR with the enhanced level of visibility LogicMonitor provided. Built-in dashboards and the ability to create custom, complex data sources were also instrumental in reducing the amount of time they would’ve spent trying to figure out where an issue was occurring.
“When we’re talking to leadership, we’re able to say, hey since we rolled out this tool, the benefits of having it has already paid off,” Villarreal said after LogicMonitor metrics were able to quickly pinpoint a backend storage issue for their AWS AppStream fleet.
Benefits:
By partnering with LogicMonitor, Carrier has been able to significantly improve visibility into their hybrid infrastructure, reduce MTTR, and proactively pinpoint issues before they reach critical status through a single pane of glass view.
Because Carrier handles many mergers and acquisitions to grow market share and the different businesses in their portfolio, a key requirement that’s asked of the IT team is to integrate those entities quickly to receive the most value out of the acquisition.
“From a digital standpoint, the best way we can leverage LogicMonitor is to put eyes on the environment, see what’s really happening and how things are behaving. Stats and things that a company will give you about their environment tell you one story, but a tool doesn’t lie. LogicMonitor can point and tell you exactly what’s happening in the environment and gives you a lot of information to make data-based decisions with,” Johnston explained.
Since implementing LogicMonitor, Carrier has been able to gain more control over their environment and reaction times. Now, with a single pane of glass view, the team no longer has to waste valuable time searching for issues in individual reports from specific devices in their infrastructure.
“We’ve proven that we can tremendously reduce MTTR. We can react to issues promptly and easily create dashboards on the fly. Looking at the metrics, we can pinpoint the issues we’re facing and get them resolved as quickly as possible,” Villarreal said.
Because Carrier has seen the benefit of leveraging LogicMonitor in their journey to unified observability, they’ve turned toward exploring where else LogicMonitor can provide value that aligns with their observability roadmap.
“As our visibility improved, we became better. Because we could see things better and react better, we’re now graduating to the next level and introducing logs,” Johnston said.
Carrier is looking at event correlation against logs to shorten their troubleshooting timelines to continue to reduce MTTR with LM Logs. They’re also looking at APM to increase predictive analysis and anticipate user experience to get ahead of any problems, before they become problems, within their application environments.
“We selected LogicMonitor because that’s the platform that we think brings everything together. Having the network devices, having the servers, having the cloud vendors, all in a single platform, has truly helped us get through all of the challenges we’ve had,” Villarreal said.