Ensono Case Study: Entuity delivers as Ensono advances its business

Overview
For nearly five decades, Ensono has helped organizations move ahead with their IT initiatives. When it comes to earning their clients’ trust as exceptional guardians of their IT service management platforms, Ensono’s technology expertise plays a large part. Evidence of this is that even before the cloud was being talked about, Ensono was pioneering leading edge cloud innovation for its global client base offering solutions and services across all industries. Ensono is a service provider that understands the new world digital economy and the value of a reliable and superior end-user experience.

Company size:
Privately held

• 2,000 global associates

• 200+ clients

Network Management Software:

• Entuity Network Analytics

Other integrations:

• BMC TrueSight Operations
  Management

The Challenge
With the advent of digital transformation, services being delivered to end-users are changing at breakneck speeds. To enable their clients to respond to rising end-user expectations, Ensono realized that operational efficiency, streamlined network monitoring and the ability to rapidly add new devices under management were critical to build out the network and service performance necessary to meet these needs.

How to reduce the impact of these digital growing pains and ultimately improve the end-user experience was important to Ensono and their clients. Ensono was looking to fast track their network monitoring strategy to make their service management and client performance key differentiators. The fact was, Ensono had plenty of management tools, too many. It was tool overload. They were using disparate tools that were expensive to support and, in some instances, unreliable, not to mention tedious to monitor on multiple consoles. This approach was making it difficult to manage the contemporary IT services necessary for Ensono clients’ businesses.

The Solution
Having decided that multiple tools was not the most effective way to manage a variety of complex networks, Ensono focused on combining their tool sets.
“Consolidation is huge for us as is the reliability of tools,” states Sean O’Brien,
Senior Manager – Enterprise Solutions for Monitoring at Ensono. “Some tools would go down a lot. So, you are constantly having to monitor the tool and get it back online—creating more work for my team.” After a rigorous evaluation of several network management products, Entuity Network Analytics was selected as it met Ensono’s top prerequisites:

• an all-in-one network management functionality that replaced disparate tools
• seamlessly integrated into their BMC TrueSight AIOps platform
• was reliable in its performance uptime
• could quickly integrate new technologies
• provided a robust multitenancy architecture.

The Results

Continuously adding new technologies for a complete network picture
During the evaluation process it became clear that network management products are not all the same and several did not effectively manage new technologies. For example, the Nexus switch was not covered in a few products and according to O’Brien, “Entuity put some solid thought and development into understanding what was necessary to manage within the Nexus product to be able to proactively identify switch problems. They have done a stellar job of handling some of the new technologies in the marketplace.” Incorporating new technologies is vital when it comes to managing today’s networks.

“Entuity put some solid thought and development into understanding what was necessary to manage within the Nexus product to be able to proactively identify switch problems. They have done a stellar job of handling some of the new technologies in the marketplace.”
– Sean O’Brien, Senior Manager – Enterprise Solutions for Monitoring, Ensono

Multitenancy empowers clients with transparency
As a service provider, the ability to handle multitenancy was very important to Ensono. “It’s a transparency thing. We need to be able to allow client A to log into a monitoring console and see what we see. And we need to be able to do that without them accidentally seeing client B” states O’Brien. Entuity’s multitenancy architecture allows specific, customized privileges to segment their clients’ access. Ensono’s client portal provides clients a robust way to see invoices and their monitored data from multiple sources such as BMC and Entuity. This consolidated client portal offers a single point of entry into their Ensono data. Taking advantage of Entuity’s multitenancy architecture delivers personalized on-demand access that increases client/Ensono transparency, client loyalty and add-on capabilities/revenue opportunities. Ensono strives for intimate clent relationships to keep them apprised on how their network is currently running and to proactively suggest where enhancements or new services may be necessary for future growth.

Consolidation of management tools drives efficiency and accuracy
One way streamlining monitoring tools has helped Ensono diminish management complexity is through an improved way to monitor WAN circuits. They can now reduce the number of SNMP trap destinations required from 7 IPs to 2 IPs, allowing Ensono to deliver all the services necessary for this type of management. The big change here is that Ensono needs only a single console to manage it rather than five consoles originally being used. Less complexity and better management visibility equips Ensono to work more efficiently and see anomalies before they become issues. Likewise, having all the network interdependencies found under one umbrella, analytics such as historical traffic patterns, capacity analytics are easy to generate and use for IT planning purposes.

A powerful combination: Entuity, BMC and Ensono
Ensono takes advantage of the BMC TrueSight AIOps platform and it was important that network monitoring be integrated into this bigger picture reflecting their end-to-end management ecosystem. “Literally after 15 minutes of work, we had Entuity fully integrated to our BMC environment and opening tickets to our NOC,” states O’Brien. Entuity Network Analytics is seamlessly included in the BMC dashboard making it one click away from illustrating how the network is affecting applications. “Having Entuity data automatically roll up into our BMC TrueSight platform allows a true single pane of glass for event visibility, analytics and processing.”

Moving Ahead
Entuity Network Analytics will continue over time to reduce Ensono’s hours spent managing the network and its associated costs by a streamlined, automated solution. O’Brien reveals, “We are starting to see cases where Entuity is routinely finding and managing things like Cisco Nexus FEC modules and automatically opening tickets on problems. These were challenging with some of our other tools. Now we can address these types of issues before they cause an outage –it is even better than a faster resolution. It is true proactive outage prevention.” In addition to automation, Entuity’s breadth of analytics adds a layer of historical data that helps Ensono understand, evaluate and resolve the underlying reasons that are causing network or application issues. All this arms Ensono with a foundation for dependably introducing new services and responding to customer needs more quickly. Ensono is looking forward to its partnership with Entuity. “Our Ensono team has already suggested a couple of features to Entuity that were needed, and we quickly received patches to accommodate these requirements,” said O’Brien. This close collaboration will accelerate network efficiency, performance and innovation while at the same time keep Ensono client satisfaction at high levels.

“We are starting to see cases where Entuity is routinely finding and managing things like Cisco Nexus FEC modules and automatically opening tickets on problems. These were challenging with some of our other tools.”
– Sean O’Brien, Senior Manager – Enterprise Solutions for Monitoring, Ensono

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.