Problem overview

The Director of Information Technology used to find out about problems when he received a call from a user. Besides, he had no way of knowing whether the services provided by his management were working or not.

Solution overview

We generated a monitoring platform with dashboards and alerts by instant messaging and in real time, which makes it possible to know the exact moment when users are experiencing a degradation or interruption of the services.

Thanks to this solution, whenever I receive a complaint I know right away whether we actually have a problem with our services or not. This allowed me to have greater control over the service we provide. It is an excellent work from Mikroways.

Detailed solution

The agency had a Nagios-based monitoring system that generated too many alerts, mixing low-impact ones with critical ones that had to be dealt with immediately. As a result, critical alerts used to go unnoticed. In turn, since the logic was focused on services and not users, many alerts didn’t have a real impact on the final user.

With the needs of the user in mind, from Mikroways we decided to focus monitoring on the user experience. To do it, we surveyed around 150 systems of the organism, selecting the most critical 30. Then, we implemented a series of robots that simulate typical user workflows, recording the time each operation takes. All information is collected and stored in a time series database (TSDB) and, in the event of a system failure or excessive delay, an alert is generated with a screenshot of the error received.

We also generated dashboards to show the status of each system and of the different servers and services, allowing the possibility of incorporating periodic reports.