the State of North Dakota Powers Decisions with Zenoss

• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

• Cities & Municipalities

• Maintenance
• Quality Assurance

• Infrastructure Inspection
• Predictive Maintenance

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

The Information Technology Department (ITD) for the State of North Dakota provides IT operations for nearly all of the state’s government entities. They also provide network access to K-12, Higher-ed, and various regional facilities via a statewide network. The IT operations team was tasked with monitoring presidential and state election services. However, the team faced major obstacles in making intelligent decisions about their IT environment. The tools they had in place were inconsistent among the various platforms and much of the infrastructure had no performance monitoring at all. If a problem arose they did ad-hoc monitoring with system tools but had no real visibility into the past. This made it very difficult to diagnose and apply corrections to application performance problems. They needed a monitoring system in place that would not only track the entire performance of their system over a long period of time, but would also be able to correlate the impact of different services and devices in their infrastructure.

The customer in this case study is the State of North Dakota, specifically the Information Technology Department (ITD). The ITD is responsible for the IT operations of nearly all of the state's government entities. This includes providing network access to over 300 geographically dispersed school districts that depend on ITD for hosting a common student information system platform. The IT operations team is also tasked with monitoring presidential and state election services. The ITD operates from the state capital, Bismarck, but also provides services to various regional facilities via a statewide network.

The State of North Dakota decided to replace existing limited monitoring solutions from Compuware and HP with a new system that would provide end-to-end visibility. Four companies made the short list – Zenoss, Nagios, Compuware, and HP. After careful review and some internal proof-of-concept deploys, the State of North Dakota decided to go with Zenoss due to the simplicity of the product, agentless monitoring capabilities and the overall data visibility Zenoss provided. The simplicity of the product lent itself to a quick educational curve so several administrators were able to use it compared to the specific training requirements other products required. With hundreds of Windows servers, VMware, Oracle Real Application Clusters, AIX, Linux, and a mainframe, being able to combine data across servers, virtualization farms, storage servers, networking, and applications for easy analysis was a key goal for the new system. Once Zenoss began monitoring the state’s operations, the team immediately benefited from the simpler data collection process.

• With Zenoss, the team has a year of statistics which they use to improve decisions, eliminating a lot of the finger pointing that happens within an IT department.
• The team was able to reach their goal of making more intelligent decisions when it came to solving issues and began to extend basic monitoring with custom application monitoring.
• Zenoss is able to address the diverse needs of all these sub-ecosystems and help maintain performance on each of these networks with detailed data of each device running on the system.