Home / Blog / IT Managed Services / University adopts SolarWinds Managed Service improving User Experience

July 3, 2018

SolarWinds’ formidable IT monitoring platform has helped Plymouth University adopt a ‘NOC culture’ to help deliver an ‘Always-On’ user experience for some 30,000 users across its multiple sites.

With the help of a SolarWinds Managed Service, Plymouth University adopts a Network Operations Centre (NOC) culture to help deliver the ‘Always-On’ user experience.

Developing a Network Operations Centre (NOC) culture requires organisations to build intelligence into their existing infrastructure monitoring investment, through the tuning of alerts and their responses to them.

By defining the correct dependencies, rules, alerts, escalation processes and automation, organisations such as Plymouth University are now able to achieve NOC-style performance levels at a fraction of the cost of building their own bespoke Network Operations Centre.

As the UK’s leading SolarWinds authority, a SolarWinds Managed Service from Comtact Ltd. has helped optimise Plymouth University’s IT infrastructure monitoring, helping secure 20% service management saving over 18 months.

Plymouth University campus

With a SolarWinds Managed Service, Plymouth University’s drive to build a NOC culture has led to a number of key benefits, contributing to a significant 20% saving in its overall services management budget – freeing up funds for student-facing facilities and services.

NOC culture-led activities for Plymouth University, include:

  • Monitoring of average website transaction times, identifying service degradation before it becomes critical.
  • Tracking actual Wi-Fi usage performance with campus heat maps, ensuring greater accuracy when planning for future demand.
  • Providing automated break/fix service, ensuring continuity of service – particularly over weekends where, previously, downtime could negatively impact the Student Experience.
  • Monitoring campus-wide web usage to track those exploiting resources and impacting service levels for other users.
  • Optimising server performance, with more cost-effective usage enabling a 20% reduction in overall server numbers.

Plymouth University IT student

“Today’s students quite rightly expect always-on performance; however, with most of them now using around three devices concurrently, we’re effectively dealing with the challenge of supporting upwards of 75,000 user devices,” explained Gary Bayliss, Head of Service Management at Plymouth University.

“Working with Comtact Ltd., we’ve been able to keep on refining our infrastructure monitoring approach and are now proactively watching for outage events so that we’re ready to provide the kind of immediate real-time responsiveness that helps us guarantee uptime.”

“For Plymouth University, effective service management is all about mitigation of risk, and Comtact has been instrumental in helping us to shape our NOC Culture – ensuring that we’re in a position to react much more quickly when issues arise,” added Gary.

“Universities are one of the most demanding IT infrastructure environments, so it’s been particularly important for us to take advantage of Comtact’s proven NOC expertise to help us really track all the key performance elements that go towards creating a best practice Student IT Experience.”

Build your internal NOC team monitoring capabilities

Outsourcing SolarWinds management does certainly not mean giving up internal skills and expertise. Collaboration is the key.

You know your infrastructure. We know SolarWinds. As an industrial user of SolarWinds ourselves, we find the best way to work is a collaboration with in-house experts, building your own team’s monitoring capabilities, to get the most from our combined expertise.

Comtact's UK NOC / SOC

The UK’s leading SolarWinds authority

For nearly 10 years, Comtact Ltd. has been helping the UK’s leading enterprises get the most from their SolarWinds deployments. We know the common pitfalls, as well as the time it takes to iron out, optimise and improve your IT monitoring.

And with 24x7x365 support from Comtact’s fully managed SolarWinds monitoring service, often, the first time you know there’s a problem is when we tell you it’s been fixed.

What’s the next step?

We’d love to talk you through some more of our customer success stories. Or why not request a call-back from one of our SolarWinds-Certified Professionals to discuss your current IT monitoring challenges?

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About Comtact Ltd.

Supporting clients 24x7x365 from our ISO27001-accredited Network Operations Centre (NOC) in Milton Keynes, Comtact Ltd. is the UK’s leading authority on SolarWinds, with a large in-house team of SolarWinds-Certified Professionals supporting and managing the network operations of some of the UK’s leading organisations.