“Because OpsRamp can monitor any infrastructure, whether on-premises, in a private or in the public cloud, it’s an ideal match for customers that are running hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”
Case Study
Markley Group Deploys OpsRamp to Support Hybrid Cloud Modernization for Customers
Vertical: IT Services
Markley Group Success Story
Synopsis
Markley Group is a Boston-based data center leader. Founded in 1991, the company operates a data center portfolio that exceeds three million square feet, offering co-location and private cloud services to customers across multiple sectors including life sciences and financial services. Its customers have diverse needs from compliance to performance, making Markley’s services more attractive for some workloads than using public cloud providers. The company supplements its hosting services with disaster recovery and backup, as well as direct connect to AWS, a vital offering for customers running hybrid IT environments. “For us, it’s all about giving our customers options,” says Patrick Houston, Director of Engineering at Markley Group.
About Markley Group
Founding Year
1991
Business
New England’s largest and longest operating
multi-tenant, mission-critical
telecommunications and
data center facility.
Operations
3,000,000 square-feet of data center
space across U.S./Europe
Business Challenges
To compete with major cloud service providers, Markley needed a modern, multi-tenant monitoring solution that spanned on-prem, private cloud and public cloud infrastructure.
The Solution
Markley deployed OpsRamp to monitor its own data center infrastructure for clients and is also offering the solution as a service for customers to deploy internally.
Key Benefits
Markley has gained first-ever capabilities for business service mapping and topology mapping to prioritize and resolve incidents faster, and achieved a 6X reduction in time spent patching systems.
The Need For Change
Markley Group offers customers a feature-rich suite of services, a portfolio the company continues to grow to effectively compete with the major public cloud providers. “As we expand our offerings, we needed a robust multi-tenant monitoring solution, which led us to OpsRamp,” Houston said. The company replaced an older monitoring solution in the Spring of 2020 with OpsRamp, and also offers OpsRamp as a service to customers. “Because OpsRamp can monitor any infrastructure, whether on-premises, in a private or in the public cloud, it’s an ideal match for customers that are running hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” he said.
Saving Time and Gaining Visibility
Markley Group has realized several benefits so far from using OpsRamp to monitor its internal IT infrastructure, which are critical to delivering high-quality, resilient services to customers:
- Service maps and actionable dashboards: With OpsRamp, Markley can now create service maps for individual business services and access the related dashboards to drill down into components. For instance, for the VMware service, the Markley team can view the status of all technologies supporting it, such as storage and web portals, and drill down into subservices to pinpoint the actual issue. Says Houston: “Having a big dashboard is nice but it doesn’t always tell you the impact of a device going down nor if the issue is even important. With a service map orientation we can quickly understand the business or customer impact of an incident.”
- Topology maps for auditors: Markley Group is also finding value in OpsRamp topology maps which show the relationships between application components and infrastructure. During a recent audit for ISO 27001, Markley’s team could show auditors the network topology and server infrastructure which is automatically updated. Having dynamic network configurations at their fingertips saves time during troubleshooting and ensures compliance.
- Roadmap for automation: Markley is beginning to fast-track toward greater IT automation, beginning with an investment in Ansible. OpsRamp’s integration with Ansible will be instrumental in the journey to make IT processes and workflows more efficient and accurate.
- Simplified patching: The company has experienced a 6x reduction in the maintenance windows for patching key operating systems. Prior to OpsRamp, the team had to use one system to patch Windows, another for Linux, and then use its monitoring tool to document and track the changes. Now, employees use a single system, OpsRamp, to schedule and execute all patching tasks from one browser window. The new process is much smoother, automated and faster for the Markley team. “This is a real time-savings advantage for us and for our customers, as they have less scheduled downtime during patching,” Houston said.
“Now with OpsRamp, we can finally do that. This capability should help us grow our cloud business as well as support another line of revenue by reselling this service to our customers.”
Patrick Houston , Director of Engineering at Markley Group
Business Value
As Markley has gained expertise with the OpsRamp platform, the IT organization sees the potential of using it as a single pane of glass and command center to manage all IT operations, according to Houston. “If we want to be competitive as a private cloud provider, we need to offer all the core services that our customers are using in the public cloud including monitoring and the ability to show detailed metrics from all components,” he says.
