Polytech Montpellier
Polytech Montpellier has chosen the ServiceNav solution to supervise its information system and its educational applications, used daily by 1500 students and 200 agents and professors
The context
Supervise a network and an information system that is increasingly complex and heterogeneous
Polytech Montpellier, the university polytechnic school of Montpellier is the engineering school of the University of Montpellier. Created more than 40 years ago, it is part of one of the largest networks of engineering schools in France, the POLYTECH network: 10,000 engineers trained each year.
To ensure its teaching missions, the educational applications used by teachers during classes and practical work must be available. In this context, the IT department's mission is to guarantee the reliability and availability of the information system.
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ServiceNav allows to identify abnormal behavior on the system such as database sizing, abnormal memory consumption.
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Business issues
"Recently, we had a case of a teacher who could not connect to his application 5 minutes before the start of his class. Before the teacher came to us we had a ServiceNav alert on about ten servers that were no longer accessible. We were able to quickly analyze that it was one of the hosts of our virtualization system that had lost its network connection. We were able to repair it and the course went on as normal. Without ServiceNav, we would have run into authentication and domain controller issues, I estimate that it would have taken us an hour to an hour and a half to find the problem. The course would not have taken place," explains Pascal Lepinay. ServiceNav provides a real-time status of the information system. If a connection, a server or an application goes down, we see it immediately," explains Pascal Lepinay.
Why ServiceNav?
The answer
The right information at the right time to the right person.
"The simple and intuitive configuration of ServiceNav allows us to have the right information at the right time. Each person in the department receives SMS messages and e-mails within their area of responsibility, which allows them to intervene and solve problems quickly," explains Pascal Lepinay. ServiceNav makes it possible to identify abnormal behavior on the system, such as database sizing or abnormal memory consumption. "My teams work more on the cause of the problem and its resolution than on handling calls from disgruntled teachers and users."
A collaborative tool for the IT team.
"To ensure product adoption, we implemented the project in several stages. The first step was the configuration and knowledge transfer done by Com6 our integrator. Then, we explained and demonstrated the contribution of supervision to each employee's daily work. Today, the operation of the solution is carried out by my team. Two people from the IT department are in charge of supervision and the rest of the team is alerted in the event of a malfunction in their area. We have more productive exchanges and discussions thanks to the factual data and history that ServiceNav provides us. This allows us to be more efficient in identifying the cause of problems.
The benefits
The choice of a commercial solution rather than Open Source
"We chose ServiceNav for several reasons. ServiceNav is based on Nagios, to simplify I would say that ServiceNav is Nagios++. Com6, our integrator, uses the solution to manage and monitor its customers and its datacenter. This reassures us that the solution is sustainable. We did not want to correct and maintain an open source solution, I prefer that our resources are focused on solving problems on our infrastructure rather than on solving bugs on a software that we do not master. I would add that we have discovered the value of having pre-configured models. We use the repositories, the editor's knowledge of the behavior and the thresholds to be implemented. This forces us to analyze and question the behavior of our system."
"In conclusion, on a daily basis ServiceNav gives us the peace of mind to manage and operate our information system. When a user calls with a malfunction, we are already aware of it and we are already working on the solution. This allows us to professionalize and enhance the value of Polytech Montpellier's IT team".
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ServiceNav gives us the peace of mind to manage and operate our information system.
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