A small consultancy-focused reseller in New York, Everwatch Global, has found itself boosting a large e-commerce firm’s annual turnover by a cool $125m using monitoring software from Nagios.
EverWatch Global was tasked with monitoring an online store for an e-commerce retailer with a billion-dollar annual revenue.
“Beyond keeping the lights on for the store, EverWatch Global needed to ensure that the cart and checkout functionality was up and running, check for website defamation, and notify the necessary staff if anything went awry,” according to the case study from Nagios. “But it hit a roadblock upon realising the client’s datacentre was more than 500 miles away from their consultants in Rochester, New York.”
Monitoring was required for production, quality assurance, staging, and development of the platform across both sites. Firewall restrictions between different application sites, functions, and other things also posed a challenge for the monitoring environment.
“To top it all off, most of the notifications sent to the client were ignored because there were so many false positives,” according to Nagios.
EverWatch Global, using Nagios, added SSH firewall rules for network operations centre personnel and equipment, analysed web pages to check for defamatory content, converted notifications to alerts and escalations with specific scheduling for different group requirements, and configured event handlers to restart services before notification (which fixed many issues). Nagios Core was deployed via automatic configuration management on multiple servers at the network operations centre.
The new architecture was then used across production, quality assurance, staging and development environments.
Results included fewer notifications and fewer false positives, an uptime increase of 13 percentage points to 98%, and an ability to estimate the need to log into multiple boxes and change configuration files.
“In real dollar terms, the company was able to achieve almost $125m in additional sales as a result,” according to Eric Loyd, CEO of EverWatch Global.
Nagios software includes Nagios XI for monitoring the entire IT infrastructure (built on Nagios Core); Nagios Log Server for viewing, sorting, analysing, and alerting via logs from any source on any given network; Nagios Network Analyzer to see where bandwidth is dipping or spiking; and Nagios Fusion to give a centralised visual operations status.
