Martello in Motion – University of New Hampshire

Founded in 1866, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a public research university with its main campus spread across 2,600 acres in Durham, New Hampshire. For more than 154 years, UNH has delivered hands-on learning, research, and work experiences that bring together students, faculty, and private and public partners to create life-changing opportunities and innovative solutions across the world. Within 7 schools and 3 campuses, the school offers 2,000 courses in over 100 majors to more than 15,000 students. To keep this sprawling campus connected, UNH has been using Martello’s Vantage DX to ensure the performance of Microsoft 365 applications which is paramount to the productivity and satisfaction of staff and students.

Situation

Prior to purchasing and implementing Vantage DX, UNH used an industry-standard data centre monitoring solution. The UNH IT team shared the same issues that many other schools experience using the same product for monitoring applications which is that it is just too complex to configure, run and maintain. As data centre monitoring solutions usually monitor performance across the board, alarms are overabundantly resulting in much time spent investigating the source of every alarm – even when not deemed critical. In most cases, a data centre monitoring solution expert is required on staff just to monitor and maintain the product. For the UNH team, it was time to find a solution that was easy to implement and did not require any extra hands-on resources.

Solution

The UNH team decided that their data centre monitoring solution needed to be replaced with a tool that was more user-friendly and less ‘noisy’ from the constant alarms. More specifically, they were looking for a product that offered synthetic transaction testing and the ability to create custom tests to determine the status of a service or the severity of an alarm. After consulting with colleagues in the IT industry, and a quick Google search, Vantage DX became the clear choice to monitor Microsoft 365.

The implementation and configuration of Vantage DX was quick and easy with the product ready to go right out-of-the-box. There were no large-scale project plans or teams required. With very little training needed, the UNH team was quick to begin creating custom dashboards and configuring alarms that focused on the services they cared about the most. After verifying the first few alarm notifications, the team was confident that any issue that Vantage DX Robot detected was worthy of their immediate attention. After 7 years of usage, their reliability and confidence in Martello hold true to this day.

Conclusion

Since implementing Vantage DX, the IT team at UNH has been able to monitor over 6,000 end-users on Exchange and maintain a 99.9999% uptime which is the equivalent of a mere 2.6 seconds of downtime per month! The use of Vantage DX Robots to perform synthetic transaction tests which provides proactive monitoring capabilities allowing the team to recognize and resolve issues well before the end-user experience is ever impacted.

With Microsoft, there are outages at times that can prevent users from accessing Outlook and their Exchange online accounts – leaving many IT teams scrambling to determine if the issue is within their own networks, or not. Now when outages occur, the UNH IT team is able to quickly determine and find the source of the poor end-user experience. This quickly extinguishes any finger-pointing that typically occurs during an outage and eliminates the time spent it takes IT teams to investigate, troubleshoot, and repair any issue that was never their issue to begin with.

UNH’s IT team has come to trust Martello’s monitoring and alarm capabilities and the metrics it provides them. Having Vantage DX in their armament provides them with the confidence to know that they are able to keep their staff and students as productive and satisfied as possible and with minimal interruption to the learning process.