Sensirion Goes from 12 incidents annually to near zero with LogicMonitor

Challenge

Headquartered in Stäfa, Switzerland, Sensirion is the leading manufacturer of high-quality sensors and sensor solutions for the measurement and control of humidity and gas and liquid flows. Founded in 1998, Sensirion serves customers in the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Netherlands, and Germany.

Sensirion’s challenges should be familiar to many: The rapid speed of digitalization and the need to monitor information from multiple different sources. “Our biggest problem was unifying,” recalls Andi Kuehne, Head Global IT Infrastructure Services, Sensirion. But with customers around the globe across multiple different time zones and infrastructure across multiple sites, unifying Sensirion’s monitoring capabilities was no easy feat. Coupled with the challenges of upgrading a static legacy product with no auto-discovery and dependency recognition capabilities, Sensirion needed an enterprise IT platform that could help solve these problems with automation and built-in logic.

Solution

Given the scale of Sensirion’s operations and the scope of their needs, Kuehne and his team began an extensive search process.

During the search for a new monitoring solution, Sensirion had issues with one platform because it was too static, lacked templates, and wasn’t robust enough to highlight what they needed to monitor. Another potential platform was a little bit better, but it was manual to manage. Sensirion needed a solution with automated monitoring and upgrades. While the first two options evaluated were too simple, a third was too complex and cumbersome. “I would have had to hire two people full time just to manage it,” said Kuehne.

Sensirion needed automation, not just simplicity, and they also needed complete coverage without complexity. LogicMonitor offered all of the above and much more.

Benefits

Sensirion saw many of LogicMonitor’s benefits immediately upon installation. Most notably, Sensirion went from using eight monitoring tools to just one, dramatically freeing up resources, consolidating core functions, and simplifying operations.

“If there was a problem, it was time-consuming to find a solution,” remembered Kuehne. “We had to manage multiple tools and in turn look at the timestamps in each tool.”

Another major challenge LogicMonitor solved was preventing outages. With Sensirion’s previous monitoring solution, there was no intelligence behind the alerting, no root cause analysis, and no alert suppression. LogicMonitor fixed all that, enhancing the overall availability of the infrastructure dramatically, preventing dozens of hours of troubleshooting time. Time is money, and by effectively eliminating outages and troubleshooting, LogicMonitor helped Sensirion save more of both.

“LogicMonitor lets us really dig into the problem and shows us the root cause,” says Kuehne. “Since having LogicMonitor in place we haven’t suffered a major outage because we are able to prevent them up-front.”

With LogicMonitor, Sensirion increases availability by gaining key insights into the infrastructure. While their previous platform involved a lot of troubleshooting, LogicMonitor allows for problem prevention. “We have a single pane of glass view of everything, so we don’t have to go looking across eight monitoring platforms for the problem after it has already happened,” says Kuehne. “We can prevent it before it does.”

This isn’t a passive, observational process either. LogicMonitor automates problem-solving, so Sensirion doesn’t have to go looking for issues. Both LogicMonitor’s auto-discovery system and automated monitoring capabilities have caught numerous issues, such as misconfiguration of devices. “We didn’t know we had a lot of these problems until LogicMonitor was able to identify them,” said Kuehne.

The result? Much less unplanned downtime. For an international company with around-the-clock services like Sensirion, that’s huge.

But Sensirion isn’t just preventing problems with LogicMonitor; they’re discovering new opportunities. Kuehne says connecting to the cloud “is a breeze” with LogicMonitor, allowing for faster technology onboarding.

Sensirion also managed to onboard several other departments to LogicMonitor. Yield engineers can now monitor their systems and focus on maximizing sensor outputs using LogicMonitor. Meanwhile, Sensirion’s software group can access the platform and even enhance certain functionality with their own scripts.

Thanks to LogicMonitor, Sensirion is not only focused on the status quo; they’re able to grow. “We’ll certainly grow with our cloud infrastructure,” said Kuehne. “It’ll now be easier to roll out certain applications on a global scale, so we’re moving our applications to the cloud.”

Sensirion came to LogicMonitor with big demands. LogicMonitor didn’t just meet them — they expanded Sensirion’s views of what’s possible.