CASE STUDY: Municipality of Silkeborg

IT Service Management

August 12, 2020

In Silkeborg, a bustling municipality of nearly 90,000 people in central Denmark, the local government’s IT infrastructure is a critical component of the social fabric and ensures essential government services are delivered smoothly. Residents rely on the Municipality’s website to connect with government offices, while employees depend on a myriad of other applications and services to manage workflows and perform their jobs. Martello’s single pane of glass solution for government gave the Municipality of Silkeborg visibility across their IT platforms.

The Challenge

Before Martello, when the customer-facing website or internal services broke down, Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) overwhelmed Silkeborg’s system administrator, Jan Løbner Dam, and his team in alerts. It took hours to investigate each alert and get to the actual origin of a disruption. Martello’s solution was the answer that the municipality was looking for. This solution would not only create better visibility when services failed, but also reduce the time to resolution, maintaining business continuity.
With Martello, the process of sorting through alerts takes Løbner Dam and his team minutes instead of hours, a reduction of at least 80% of the time it took previously. Now, they can easily cut through the noise and filter out irrelevant alerts.

The solution allows them to swiftly drill down to the root-cause of a service interruption and delegate the fix to the appropriate staff. The municipality has even avoided false alarms shutting down a server when alerts indicated the website was down.
“[The Martello Solution] is so much faster, better and simpler, than other solutions out there,” Løbner Dam said.

The Solution

Creating views for both Silkeborg’s service desk and the IT team sees that both teams benefit from obtaining the relevant information they need. Martello gives the service desk a high-level view of the municipality’s IT health in real-time, signaling when users can’t access a particular program, meanwhile the IT team benefits from a more detailed and technical view.
The municipality started relying more heavily on Martello’s solution when they wanted to integrate their IT systems.

“[Martello’s Solution] created a bridge between SCOM and SCSM. It gives me and the people around me a better view of what is happening and how everything is linked together. With Martello, we can see the whole picture.”
– Jan Løbner Dam, System Administrator

The Result

With Martello, Løbner Dam can easily monitor the municipality’s IT health from a large screen in the corner of the office or from his tablet in the comfort of his own home. He can spend more time on long-term or new IT projects and less time handling day-to-day flare-ups.

With Martello, Løbner Dam and his team can view business services in both integrated platforms, to enrich incidents with affected service information to determine impact so the team can prioritize and triage the issue more quickly.
“[Martello’s solution] created a bridge between SCOM and SCSM. It gives me and the people around me a better view of what is happening and how everything is linked together,” he said. “We can see the whole picture.”