The IT story behind 911 emergency services

At 2:37am on a cold Oregon night, a fire alarm blared at a rural station. Seconds later, the call came in: a structure fire on the outskirts of Rogue Valley. But what if that alarm never reached the station?

This isn't a hypothetical. For the IT team at Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon (ECSO 911), it’s the kind of emergency scenario they prepare for every day.

ECSO 911 is the heartbeat of emergency response across Southern Oregon, and when someone calls 911 during an emergency, they expect the call to be answered and help to be dispatched—without any delays.

The role of IT

What most people don’t see is the IT infrastructure—servers, routers, firewalls, mobile units, and more—that powers this system.

ECSO’s radio towers, VoIP systems, applications, and 911 phone systems must operate 24/7 without fail to ensure that calls go through. Even the slightest network hiccup, hardware failure, or performance drop could delay a response. Or worse, the call or response is stopped altogether.

The challenge

ECSO only had two people overseeing this mission-critical, distributed network. There were no dedicated teams for server management, network monitoring, or application performance. For a setup that complex—and that vital—they needed more than just manual oversight. They needed a solution that would act as a catalyst for their work.

What OpManager offered: Unified visibility and proactive alerting

OpManager brought ECSO the unified visibility they needed—from monitoring fire station alerting systems to tracking mobile dispatch units in the field. The solution continuously monitors the health of critical devices and raises real-time alerts before an outage or failure occurs, ensuring emergency calls and dispatch operations remain uninterrupted.

OpManager has already proven its value in critical moments. One such instance involved a backup generator that was previously unmonitored—until a fault almost resulted in a costly failure. That generator is now part of ECSO’s monitored network, with real-time alerts for anomalies that could lead to downtime or damage.

Want to know what actually happened—and how much it could have cost ECSO?
Learn about the incident in detail, the savings it led to, and how OpManager continues to power ECSO’s emergency readiness from the case study video.