Case Study

BJ’s Wholesale Club Reduces Costs and Centralizes Hybrid Cloud Monitoring with OpsRamp

Vertical: Retail
BJ’s Wholesale Club Success Story

Synopsis

BJ’s Wholesale Club is a leading operator of membership warehouse clubs in the Eastern United States, with over $12 billion in annual sales. The company operates 219 clubs and 149 gas stations, serving 6 million members in 17 states.

The company is focused on delivering unbeatable value to its members and making it more convenient to shop. BJ’s ability to ramp up its same-day delivery, buy online, pick up in-club and curbside pickup services for essential groceries and products is a key part of its strategic priorities.

“We’ve made significant progress rolling out new digital services, and we have approached new models cautiously and the well-being of our team members, members and communities is always our top priority,” said Bhaskar Rao, Sr. Director of IT and Cloud Engineering.

Executing quickly upon new delivery models for members depends upon having an agile and reliable IT infrastructure to support the company’s transformational efforts.

About BJs Wholesale Club

Headquarters

Westborough, MA

Annual Revenues

$12.7 Billion

Operations

219 clubs,
149 gas stations

Customers

6 million members

Business Challenges

  • Continue growing rapidly.
  • Modernize infrastructure while keeping pace with marketplace demand.

The Solution

  • Simplify and centralize hybrid IT monitoring with a unified ITOM platform.

Key Benefits

  • Single pane of glass for comprehensive infrastructure visibility.
  • Flexible, role-based dashboards.
  • Alert correlation to reduce noise and speed root cause identification.

The Need For Change

BJ’s runs its operations on a modern hybrid IT infrastructure consisting of on-premise data centers and cloud landing zones across public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Since beginning its journey to the cloud four years ago, BJ’s now has a significant percentage of its technology and infrastructure services running in the cloud. As the hybrid infrastructure has evolved, the company wanted to ensure it could maintain consistent high performance for users across all applications and multiple environments. The company’s legacy infrastructure monitoring and management solution wasn’t designed to effectively monitor public cloud infrastructure. There was also mounting technical debt and complexity from unretired technical architectures over the years.

“We had been using traditional monitoring tools, where there were multiple products strung together,” Rao says. “We needed to learn all the different components of each tool to use it, which was not an efficient use of our team’s resources. We wanted a modern, holistic solution to make this easier and more cost effective. We also wanted to achieve the benefits of a single pane of glass.”

Simplifying and Centralizing Hybrid IT Monitoring

BJ’s decided to gradually replace its legacy monitoring systems with OpsRamp’s modern IT operations management platform. OpsRamp satisfied two major use cases at BJ’s: hybrid IT and synthetic monitoring and proactive event management through AIOps. At a higher level, IT wished to enhance its ability to be an agile service provider for all the company’s lines of business.

“OpsRamp has been built from the ground up for managing both traditional physical and infrastructure as a service (IaaS),” says Rao. “It is lightweight, cost-effective and everyone loves the role-based dashboards”.

Bhaskar Rao , Sr. Director of IT and Cloud Engineering

Implementing OpsRamp across an extensive legacy infrastructure was at times challenging, according to Rao, due to older operating systems such as IBM AIX. “This is a difficult environment to monitor but OpsRamp worked very hard to get us set up quickly and support the technologies we needed to maintain.”

The First to Know of Issues Across Hybrid Cloud Environment

From central visibility and tool integrations to expanded cloud support and cost savings, BJ’s IT command center has realized several benefits from OpsRamp so far, allowing teams to be more proactive and efficient in maintaining the performance of important business services. Those key areas of value include:

With OpsRamp, we always have the latest updates on the health of our infrastructure and applications, which means we are first to know about issues before something fails and affects business operations,” says Rao. “These capabilities are extremely important for our organization to continue supporting team members and members with high-quality digital tools and services on a daily basis.”