160-year old energy management company eliminates tool sprawl and reduces alerts by 40%
Challenge
Headquartered in Rueil-Malmaison, France, Schneider Electric is a global leader in energy management technologies and real-time automation digital solutions, with a focus on energy efficiency and sustainability.
“We bring the green aspect to most of our products,” said Sankeet Lokhande, Senior Engineer, Schneider Electric.
“We have been around for almost 160 years and sustainability is key,” said Arun Mandayam, IT Manager, Schneider Electric. “In fact, we were recognized as one of the most sustainable companies on the planet.”
Given Schneider’s global reach and green tech, their massive customer base spans multiple continents, time zones and industries.
“Our end-users are everybody,” said Mandayam. “We work with
corporations and governments. We support Google, Amazon, and many big data centers.”
Schneider’s scale and scope required an observability platform that not only provided scalability, visibility, and customizability across a massive, global operation, but one that can keep up with changing technology.
“Day by day, there are new products and technologies. It’s getting complex,” said Lokhande. “We must have a single pane of glass so that everyone is looking at the same thing. Otherwise, there’s no synergy. We’re like headless chickens running around. If you spend your efforts in different directions, the chances of them negating or canceling out are greater.”
Solution
“When we talk about unified observability, what matters is everybody looking at the same set of metrics,”
said Mandayam. “And that’s invaluable when your global operations support 25,000 network devices and countless cloud devices. We’re all looking at the same dashboard and metrics, which lets us talk the same language
and cross collaborate, which directly impacts our customer satisfaction.”
Like many organizations, Schneider attempted to monitor operations by adding more platforms. Ironically, this attempt to simplify only created more complexity and tool sprawl.
Schneider knew right away that LogicMonitor was different.
Instead of handling everything in bits and pieces across multiple monitoring tools, Schneider was able to deploy their entire IT cloud infrastructure and network infrastructure into LogicMonitor’s platform – providing the team with a unified view of their growing environment.
“Partnering with LogicMonitor, we were able to onboard our clusters, our pods, the projects, and provide visibility in terms of the utilization of our infrastructure,” said Mandayam. “From a priorities perspective, we consolidated from about 30 different platforms down to five.”
By eliminating tool sprawl and consolidating key functions with LogicMonitor, Schneider is now able to realize the numerous advantages of unified observability.
“The number one benefit of unified observability is having a single pane of glass,” said Lokhande. “With LogicMonitor, we end up achieving the common goal for the organization as one.”
Benefits
Since achieving unified observability with LogicMonitor, Schneider has also realized numerous downstream benefits.
“Since we deployed LogicMonitor our MTTI and MTTR has dropped,” said Mandayam. “In the earlier platforms, we got false alerts we had to sift through to determine what was real. We were generating about 17,000 alerts. We’re down to about 10,000, an almost 40% reduction.”
“Anomaly detection has helped us get to the root cause quickly,” said Lokhande. “Dynamic thresholds and AI forecasting lets us pinpoint the issue and troubleshoot. Otherwise we’d waste hours reviewing stuff manually.”
Schneider has been able to leverage LogicMonitor’s out-of- the-box features, as well as the ability to customize their feature-set to meet their evolving needs.
“There’s been a constant change in the technology we manage today,” said Mandayam. “We were really happy to see that LogicMonitor not only supported where we are today, but where we’re moving. The scalability was very simple.”
For all of LogicMonitor’s advanced features and functionalities — and the tremendous efficiency benefits it has brought — what Schneider has appreciated most is working with a company that values customer service.
“LogicMonitor is able to meet all of our key requirements we were trying to solve,” said Mandayam. “And they work with you to get whatever customization is required. That is one of the greatest things we found that was lacking in the other organizations we worked with.”
Since selecting LogicMonitor, Schneider has achieved unified
observability, eliminated tool sprawl, and dramatically reduced false alerts — allowing them to focus more effectively and efficiently on the organization’s true purpose: Create more energy-efficient and sustainable technologies and digital automation solutions.
“With LogicMonitor, our entire organization is finally looking at the same set of data,” said Lokhande. “This gives us the leverage to drive towards our common goal.”
Schneider Electric consolidated its monitoring tools by 83% with LogicMonitor’s observability platform. As one of the most sustainable companies on the planet, Schneider Electric is always striving to make energy better and stay innovative. Leveraging unified observability by partnering with LogicMonitor helps them in their mission-critical goal to support new technologies. LogicMonitor helps Schneider Electric gain visibility into their entire tech stack, including:
- Network
- Cloud
- Kubernetes
- On-Premises
Learn more in the video below about Schneider Electric’s roadmap for observability, and how LogicMonitor is helping them achieve the ultimate goal of self-healing.
Video Transcript:
From a priorities perspective for unified observability, one of the first things we did was we consolidated from close to about 30 different platforms or tools down to five.
We were recognized as one of the most sustainable companies on the planet. The key aspect of innovation is we keep looking at how to make energy better. Some of the challenges that we see is unified observability. This is something that is invaluable when you’re talking about a global operation supporting close to 25,000 network devices and a countless number of cloud devices. We not only have to be innovative to support the new technologies that start coming in, but also to make sure that we are able to provide visibility to our existing infrastructure. One thing we found in LogicMonitor was it supported all of our domains, whether it was network, cloud, Kubernetes, or on-prem. It’s easy to onboard all of it, it’s plug and play. We have been able to onboard a lot of these devices without spending a huge amount of time. It has the capability for us to customize and basically script out things which we want to incorporate. And that way it’s easy for us to pinpoint where the actual issue is or where the actual problem is. A roadmap for our observability, within Schneider Electric, we are currently working as monitor as self-service. We are moving towards a software delivery pipeline, which is fully automated and the ultimate step would be to move to self-healing. With the onboarding of LogicMonitor, we have been able to get to a unified observability place. From here, it’s giving us a springboard to move to the next steps.