Martello BLOG

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), located in Leiden, Netherlands, is the university hospital affiliated with Leiden University and has been a long-time customer with Martello for over 10 years. The Medical Center’s unique research practice includes fundamental medical research and applied clinical research, places LUMC among the top institutions of its kind in the world. LUMC turned to Martello originally to create a solution using our Live Maps for SCOM visualization software that integrate several IT monitoring and management tools into a single dashboard.  

Fast-forward to January of 2020 and LUMC was paying close attention to developments taking place in Wuhan as the impact of what we now know was COVID-19 started to fill up hospitals across China. Willem Bouwman, the IT Specialist heading up the Information Technology and Digital Innovation department at LUMC began to take immediate action within the IT department to brace for the expected impact of COVID-19.  

While the hospitals response teams were taking swift and definitive action to ramp up hospital beds, personal protective equipment supplies and emergency protocols within the emergency rooms at LUMC. Behind the scenes another type of preparedness was taking place to ensure that the network infrastructure required to effectively run the hospital at maximum capacity was scaled up and reliable enough to be ready for an influx of patients.  

Having already established an innovative and proactive approach to managing its IT infrastructure, LUMC had the foundation it needed to scale up quickly and prepare for a dramatic shift to supporting remote workers while shifting internal resources to an over-run emergence department.  A mix of on premise and hybrid cloud environment laid the foundation for quick transformation at LUMC.  

Tactical IT Response – When Hours Count  

As COVID-19 moved into Europe, Willem’s team prepared for the worst inside the hospital while suddenly dealing with supporting a remote work team. With everyone associated with the hospital encouraged to work from home as much as possible the supply of VPN connections were in short supply at first with VPN users exploding. Prior to the shift to remote work there were only 300-500 now it’s close to 1000 VPN connections required on a daily basis.  

Visibility quickly became an issue as well, in the LUMC IT offices there are 5 dashboards monitoring constantly for issues that might appear. With his team now dotted across the city in home offices that critical dashboard view was not being seen. The team quickly pivoted to their SCOM dashboards using Martello in their home offices.   

Willem’s team extended their IT service desk hours and included coverage on the weekend to address remote user issues. Maintenance windows became an issue as well as being ‘offline’ during this time was not an option so the team looked at overall usage and tried to best schedule maintenance when usage was low.   

Within the hospital, there was a dramatic shift with an influx of patients crowding the ICU and an overall decrease of patients in the rest of the hospital due to canceled surgeries and deferred procedures.  The ICU quickly needed to scale from around 50 beds to close to 100 to deal with critical patients. Willem’s team needed to quickly boost IT resources to the crammed ICU to increase bandwidth to accommodate the increase in patient monitoring devices that each patient required. These monitoring devices constantly assess a patient’s lung function and heart rate among many other aspects, these devices then feed into the on-premise patient information system.   

With Willems team dispersed into home offices they were stripped of the many tools available to them in their headquarters which included five wall mounted monitors that were constantly using to keep tabs on the hospital’s IT systems. Team meetings and staying connected became more challenging as they scrambled to troubleshoot IT issues and scale up IT availability to support the influx of LUMCs remote workers. Willem’s team quickly turned to the Live Maps Unity Portal to monitor their Live Maps views in a responsive way on any device. This Portal is Martello’s responsive HTML based web console that includes the features of the Live Maps Web Console, Cloud Reporter and LUMC’s unique dashboards, all in a responsive HTML based web console. It supports all drill-down functionality you are used to in the Operations Console and old Live Maps Web Console.  

As LUMC settles into a ‘new normal’, the IT Team is looking at new technologies including video consultation tools for doctors within the hospital, these are currently be evaluated and they are looking at moving forward with these options. To hear more about how LUMC’s technology response to COVID-19  and the difference that having full visibility of a mission-critical environment made all the difference during a difficult time allowing them to quickly boost and redistribute resources to where they were need it most.   

In this time when we are adapting to a ‘new normal’ LUMC continues to leverage Martello’s solutions to monitor lifesaving monitoring devices in busy emergency rooms and to ensure reliable application delivery of cloud-based services like Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, to deliver a range of performance data and analytics from a single platform.  

Interested in hearing more? Join us in discussion with Willem Bouwman as he discusses scaling medical and virtual care IT capacity in a time of crisis.   

Scaling Medical and Virtual Care Capacity in a Time of Crisis: A Tactical Response to COVID-19  

Thursday, June 4 @ 9am EDT  

Presenters 

Kevin Lee – Director Business Solutions at Martello Technologies 

Willem Bouwman – SQL Database Administrator & System Center Operations Manager Administrator 

When COVID-19 swept across Europe, front-line workers rushed into action preparing hospital beds and personal protective equipment supplies. Behind the scenes, IT teams quickly had to put measures into place to enable the dramatic shift to remote work.    

In adapting to a “new normal” Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) continues to leverage Martello’s iQ IT visualization software to monitor life-saving monitoring devices in busy emergency rooms. This ensures reliable application delivery of cloud-based services like Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, to deliver a range of performance data and analytics from a single dashboard. Supporting a remote work team within a hospital can prove to be a challenge. Learn how having the ability for full visibility allows this mission-critical environment to boost and redistribute resources to where they were need it most.    

The workforce has seen a sudden and dramatic shift to remote work. This has caused employees to move out of their typical area of where Service Level Agreements (SLAs) apply, which presents new challenges to ensure service quality. With the help of SLA reporting, IT administrators can set up custom alerts before an SLA has been breached, which could prevent an outage.  

We sat down with Luke O’Keefe, Customer Success Manager at Martello, Michael Vestergaard, an IT System Administrator, and Jacob Knudsen, a System Administrator from University College Copenhagen. 

University College Copenhagen is one of Denmark’s main providers of teacher’s education, social education, nursing and social work. With more than 20,000 students currently enrolled, it’s imperative that they can maintain a consistent, reliable digital experience.  

What are some of the new challenges you are seeing them face since this sudden shift to remote work?  

Luke: At the beginning of the Covid Crisis many of our customers saw their offices empty, and their workers moved to their own homes. For IT workers this was a big challenge, it required a lot of work in the first couple of weeks of the crisis. Many teams were relying more on cloud to augment their existing on-prem solutions with increased capacity and redundancy. Now a lot of that work has been done, so IT operations teams are turning their attention more to the monitoring part, it’s now very important that their infrastructure can handle the increased traffic and that there are no major service disruptions.

Now that the world is working from home do you feel service availability and SLA reporting has become more of a focus?  

Michael: Definitely, service availability. Mostly because we’re working from home it means that we have less overview of what’s happening so therefore the service availability is really critical right now.

What new factors, if any, are impacting SLA’s from 6 months ago? 

Jacob: We are working from home so everything has been changed into cloud-based working, more or less. We need to be able to make sure that our network is accessible more now rather than one or two servers in our server farm.

If an SLA is breached has been claimed by a customer, what tools would you use to verify that the SLA was or was not breached?  In other words, how would you use SLA’s to verify it in the future? 

Michael: What we had in the past was multiple systems and we didn’t have a good overview. Since we now have iQ, we have a lot of our monitoring systems reporting into one place and thereby we quickly have a view and we can see in the log file that everything is running fine which means it could be something on the end user’s side instead of being on the corporate network.

Could you identify which types of metrics should be monitored in an SLA? 

Jacob: Mostly what we are looking at is the end user application when we are looking at our SLAs. Your service level monitoring and response time is what we really need to look at because people are impatient- if your Google browser isn’t responding right away people will skip it and use something else.

Could you share what does an acceptable level of uptime look like today? 

Michael: That depends on what kind of view your having, from the IT department or you’re looking from the user end. From the user end we’re talking 100%, from the IT Department “four nines” 99.99%, if possible. We would like to be 100%, but you can never be 100%, it’s near impossible to be because sometimes you have external parties coming in and turn off the power because they need to do some maintenance and then it hits your SLAs.

In which ways will SLA reporting help you to scale and futureproof your company’s network? 

Michael: Using SLA we can actually go to management and say, you want to have 99.99 however, we can’t deliver because we have people turning off the power without informing us. With this SLA, we suddenly have an opportunity to be able to actually put pressure on other management teams to say, “you need to inform IT when you do this work, otherwise we can’t keep up the SLA.” Suddenly you as an IT department actually have a number you can show management saying, you spend this amount of money, you get 4 or 5% more uptime.

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