Plymouth University turns to Aurora365 to help monitor and manage its highly critical server and web estate

According Proactive Monitoring & Management specialist Aurora365 has been awarded a contract from Plymouth University to provide uptime assurance for its extensive estate of IT servers and Web applications. The systems covered serves student and faculty activities on a 24-hour basis, so is critical to Plymouth University’s daily operations. The Aurora365 service ensures enterprise class performance operated from a UK based 24x7x365 Network Operation Centre team, and will provide the University with a cost-effective service that both eliminates downtime while also improving the service offered to students and staff.

This latest contract builds on the success of Plymouth University’s previous Aurora365 deployment, completed in 2013, that provides managed service assurance for the uptime and performance of the University’s Cisco network. The advanced levels of proactive monitoring and management delivered by this project has been a key enabler for Plymouth University to promote a comprehensive 24-hour ‘Open for Business’ IT SLA to its staff and students. Aurora365 was selected by Plymouth University following an extensive technology exploration of service models to deliver on the predicted business benefits.

“As the results from Aurora365 have been so impressive to date it makes complete business and financial sense to extend the deployment to include our servers and web estate, and we’re looking forward to realising similar uptime benefits to drive our 99.97% SLA,” commented Gary Bayliss, Head of Service Management at Plymouth University. “At Plymouth we’re committed to a cycle of continuous service improvement of our major IT estate, server and web applications clearly being a critical part of our offering. Working with Aurora365 gives us not only the reassurance of greater uptime and cost-effective performance, but we also benefit from the flexibility that the Aurora365 team offers in terms of fine-tuning their service proposition and integrating with our own internal capabilities and ambitions.”

“It’s great news that Plymouth University has extended its Aurora365 deployment to cover servers and web apps,” added Dominic List Aurora365’s Chairman. “Over the past year we’ve proved the effectiveness of our Managed Service approach, helping the University to proactively overcome a number of challenging issues. We’ve proven the business benefits of our offering and we look forward to delivering on similar ROI results following this latest deployment.”

According to Denis Mills, Operations & Maintenance Manager at Plymouth University: “Whilst monitoring technology is one thing, the most important thing is combining this with an intelligent service management approach that looks to pre-empt issues from happening in the first place and when they do occur fixing them real-time. For example, working with Aurora365 we found that our 24-hour printer service in the University Library was prone to fail due to the wide range of encodings on the jobs that were thrown at it from student owned devices. Aurora365 was able to devise an in-depth check and automated restart of failures, meaning that service continuity is no longer an issue and students are able to complete their work 24x7 to meet deadlines.”

Another example of Aurora365 in action was the resolution of teething issues following the launch of a new flagship Meraki wireless service for the students. Into the Universities busiest time of year service performance and availability began to suffer into the wider Cisco estate, and Aurora365 was able to pinpoint the exact root cause through its advanced debugging capability. Denis commented: “Plymouth University has a sizeable Cisco network which when combined with other technologies from the likes of Meraki can make debugging challenging. Technology aside, having an expert team to help diagnose a fault in the needle in the haystack scenario that was presented was a great help for us to rapidly determine root cause and define countermeasures to get the service back to where it needed to be.”

Aurora365 is an affordable infrastructure monitoring and management service that frees up IT departments time, leading to optimal IT performance and greater business performance. Web-based dashboards allow customers to monitor website load times by location, page or transaction, and receive alerts to identify the heaviest page elements or images that are not displaying as intended.

With the Managed Service option customers can rest assured knowing that Aurora’s expert team can act as a single point of contact, monitoring the entire IT infrastructure 24/7/365, and delivering proactive problem resolution before faults and outages impact their business.