Established about four decades ago, FP McCann is the largest precast concrete manufacturer in the United Kingdom, specializing in producing both overground and underground materials. Handling more than 100 orders per day, the company has provisioned materials for the construction of many notable projects, like the Birmingham Alexander Stadium where the 2022 Commonwealth Games were held.
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FP McCann’s success and growth can be attributed to its robust IT infrastructure, which underwent a transformative digital overhaul. By digitizing all its operations, FP McCann streamlined its processes and enhanced efficiency across the board. Now heavily relying on digital systems, it required a comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring solution to ensure everything was functioning well.
Challenges faced in IT infrastructure monitoring
Maintaining the health of its IT infrastructure is essential to FP McCann’s business, but due to the complexities in its previous system, it faced the risk of frequent outages. By transitioning to a new solution, it aimed to address these issues and reduce the risk of disruptions.
1. Remote monitoring: Although its headquarters and data centers are based in Northern Ireland, the company’s branch offices are spread across Great Britain to serve its widespread customer base. Given this distributed network, the company’s central IT team required an overall view of the network’s health and performance. The company needed a robust system that could track critical metrics, proactively raise alerts ahead of potential outages or issues, and keep the network up and running.
2. Alert fatigue: Before transitioning to ManageEngine, FP McCann used SolarWinds but faced escalating challenges as the network expanded along with company growth. Managing an increasing number of devices was overwhelming, further exacerbated by the flood of alerts generated. With too many alerts, IT team members faced the risk of not focusing on the critical issues that could disrupt business operations.
3. Slow troubleshooting: To monitor servers remotely, FP McCann needed granular visibility into its server infrastructure. When downtime occurred, accessing devices became difficult. The company needed complete visibility so that it could pinpoint specific issues and guide the on-site technician for swift resolutions.
The solution that worked: OpManager
Although FP McCann had a monitoring solution in place, it wanted a better solution that could improve the efficiency of the IT team by optimizing the workload and improving the troubleshooting time.
After exploring multiple solutions, FP McCann’s IT leadership felt that OpManager was the right fit for the company’s needs. “OpManager is an extension of our IT team; it is like having an extra person, probably two or three on a team, doing all the work that would otherwise require manpower,” said Brian Law, IT manager at FP McCann.
Centralizing visibility
OpManager enabled FP McCann to perform network monitoring from a single window, helping the company do more with much less effort. As business operations continued to grow, the number of devices also expanded, so the company needed a solution to constantly discover new devices as well as provide in-depth visibility into the availability and performance of the devices.
With OpManager, discovering core and dependent devices up to Layer 3 became simple. The Dashboard feature has provided real-time visibility into the network, enabling swift issue identification. The Rack and Floor Views have facilitated the remote monitoring of server racks, enabling prompt resolution of any malfunctions.
Reducing the troubleshooting time significantly
Given FP McCann’s distributed network spread across the UK, maintaining the proper functioning of the branch offices’ networks is crucial for avoiding disruptions to business operations.
FP McCann’s previous system had email alerting, but relying on email alerts made important alerts go unnoticed when IT administrators were away from their screens, particularly at night. However, with the instant SMS alerts in OpManager, the IT team members have received notifications quickly, allowing them to swiftly address issues and reduce the overall troubleshooting time significantly.
Watch the full case study video to hear from Law as he discusses how transitioning to OpManager has significantly improved the performance of FP McCann’s IT infrastructure by minimizing downtime as well as how this shift has had a lasting, positive impact on the business.
