Stadtwerke Speyer improves reporting with ITRS Opsview

Increasing market liberalization of the energy sector in Germany is prompting many utility companies to diversify their product portfolio to attain a competitive advantage. Stadtwerke Speyer is no different following this trend by using the extra capacity in its IT infrastructure to offer managed server and application hosting services to local SMBs.

One challenge for Stadtwerke Speyer is that its IT infrastructure is spread across two datacenters, one production and one backup. The company also uses a mixture of Windows and Linux operating systems running a variety of application stacks, storage devices, switches and environmental systems.

But as Fabian Lorenz, IT systems architect said, the company’s core challenge is maintaining the high levels of complex electronic data exchange with other utility providers to set up new customer accounts.

“It’s really easy to change energy suppliers in Germany so it's critical for us to maintain the automated business processes necessary to quickly onboard new customers.”

“IT monitoring is mission critical for any organization providing an IT service to its customers. If you don’t have it, or think you can get away with free tools, it can get very dangerous, very quickly, Lorenz added.

Choosing Opsview for value

Lorenz and his team have considerable experience using Nagios®-based monitoring tools, most recently Centreon®, but they wanted a product that was professionally supported, easy to maintain, scalable as business grows, and where they could see continuous product development. In other words, a robust and well-conceived monitoring platform.

“Nagios Core was just too bare bones for us. It’s tough to set up because you’ve got to install every plugin yourself,” explained Lorenz. “We tried out Centreon for a while, but we didn’t feel it was actively maintained and had no visibility of their roadmap.”

“We wanted a Nagios-based monitoring tool that is easy to install and extend. But we also wanted to work with guys who leveraged a vibrant community eco-system to drive their product development forward. That’s why we chose Opsview.”

Deployment and Result

After Opsview Enterprise was deployed across their IT infrastructure, the benefits of their new monitoring platform were quickly realized and sometimes surprising. “All of our managed hosting customers now receive scheduled, branded SLA reports that prove the value of our services."

Additionally, management is now also better informed about the great service my team delivers to our customers and staff, he said.” Richly detailed, easy-to-use dashboards are rapidly becoming a must-have for many IT organizations today as Lorenz pointed out.

“We currently use Opsview’s dashboards to present a high-level, unified view of our all our critical IT services and processes to non-technical business users. They also look great on the big screens in our network operations center.”

Learn more about Opsview.