Our Premium Partners at the ATS Group have a regional telecom provider on the West Coast of the United States as one of their key clients. The provider covers a massive geographical area on a limited budget and serves thousands of (primarily rural) customers.
The Challenge
After recent price hikes by the “big-box” monitoring solutions, the provider needed an alternative with a more stable pricing model. Simply put, their budget was shrinking, but their software monitoring costs were expanding.
The provider had a large stock of non-traditional IT equipment that all needed to be monitored effectively, and they also had only one month to get all monitored devices and endpoints over to a new solution.
On top of that, many of the provider’s legacy systems were directly related to regulatory compliance and therefore needed to be operational from day one.
The Solution
The provider set about migrating to a complete and robust Zabbix 7.0 solution that would eliminate any foreseeable issues – even the loss of an entire data center.
There were a few initial hiccups in the implementation when it came to getting PostgreSQL set up with database proxies, but the ATS Group team quickly arrived at an architecture that the provider was happy with. The clear and easy-to-follow Zabbix documentation was of particular help.
The Results
The new Zabbix solution, as implemented, was able to monitor a number of things that had previously been challenging, including:
• Doors. The provider badly needed a solution for monitoring doors, including entrance and exit doors as well as cabinet doors in data centers. They had long-term compliance issues with doors sticking open, employees forgetting to close doors, etc. Zabbix made it easy to develop custom SNMP traps that send alerts in case of open doors, solving the issue.
• Weather. The provider’s services are available over a large and varied geographical area that encompasses multiple states. The ability of Zabbix to predict weather changes across this area has been an important added bonus, with the provider now being able to get future weather alerts that can be used to compare against equipment tolerance levels. Personnel can then be sent to affected areas in anticipation of weather events, instead of being purely reactive.
• SLAs. The provider functions as an ISP that provides internet access to customers in rural areas, many of whom may not have other means of accessing the world around them. As such, they not only feel a strong sense of duty to provide consistent uptime, but they are bound by a strict set of service level agreements (SLAs). With Zabbix, it’s possible to provide SLAs for some of the remote edge equipment involved by building an integration with ServiceNow.
In conclusion
The telecom provider in question trusts Zabbix to guarantee rural broadband access for thousands of customers over an enormous geographic area. Zabbix not only gets the job done more effectively than other monitoring solutions, it does so at a fraction of the cost.
For more details about this case study, check it out on video here.