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What made us go with Site24x7 was the fact it was all-encompassing. It was able to monitor not just infrastructure, but also services.
Get in-depth visibility into key performance indicators.
Get detailed insights into Docker containers and hosts.
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COURE Technologies Inc. is a business process automation company focused on the accurate, secure, and timely provision of relevant data.
Lagos, Nigeria
Data provider, technology
COURE Technologies Inc. is a telecom data service provider based in Nigeria. It wants to be the first and final choice for companies seeking accurate, secure, and timely data across Africa and farther afield.
To do so, it needs to be able to provide its clients with the data they need, whenever they need it. In short, its services have to be up and running 24/7.
As Emmanuel Umoh, the DevOps team lead at COURE, explained, clients are always pulling information from COURE, including during working hours, in the evenings, or on weekends. “We are always supposed to be up,” said Umoh.
So how could COURE’s Support and Monitoring team members make sure everything was up and running even when they were not at work? They needed eyes on the system.
COURE realized it needed a solution that would constantly feed it information on the status of its infrastructure and services. It wanted a solution that notified it whenever intervention was needed so it could take action quickly.
The company had been using its software’s built-in monitoring tool and scripts created locally by its own programmers. The problem with these was that if the environment went down, so did the monitor. COURE would only know there was a problem when it was not receiving any monitoring data.
COURE realized it needed a monitoring solution that was external to its environment.
As you would expect with a company that is committed to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its clients’ operations, COURE took time to research the top providers, just as it had done when choosing the Zoho One operating system. You can read about COURE’s experience with Zoho One here.
Why did COURE go with Site24x7? Because it was all-encompassing. It could monitor the company’s infrastructure as well as its services. Umoh said it was a relief having a single account where the team had everything it needed in one place.
Site24x7 did a great job of covering most of everything that we needed monitored. That’s why we went with Site24x7.
Many of the clients that COURE serves are in the financial services or telecommunications sectors. As a provider of sensitive data, COURE is bound by certain restrictions. These include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Nigeria’s own data protection law, the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR). One stipulation of the NDPR is that COURE has to host its services locally. So it built its own private infrastructure, developing a platform that its clients and partners could use.
COURE started off with a Microsoft Hyper-V environment using monolithic architecture. It needed to be able to monitor the virtual machines(VMs) running on each of its servers as well as the services it was running on those VMs. That is when it came across Site24x7. Coincidentally, it was around this time that Umoh joined COURE. As he recalled, “Part of my welcome package was to run a test on Site24x7 to see if it fit our needs as a monitoring solution.”
We started out with the monolith system, and Site24x7 worked perfectly.
With the VM monitoring Site24x7 provided, COURE could pick out all the key processes it wished to monitor. It could set the monitoring system to trigger an alert whenever any of its VM processes went down. Site24x7’s network monitors allowed COURE to make sure its interfaces were open. It was also a great help with comparing the bandwidth data from Site24x7’s pollers with the information COURE received from its ISP.
When you run a monolithic system, every update is a nightmare. Umoh said, “Most of the time, things break, and the entire package has to be rolled out, even when the fault was just a minor part.”
That’s why COURE moved to microservices and containerization using Docker. Again, it looked to Site24x7. Although there were a few matters to be ironed out initially, Umoh was impressed with the speed with which Site24x7’s Support and R&D teams worked to achieve the level of Docker monitoring COURE required.
COURE could monitor Docker, its services, and all the key container-level performance metrics within the microsystem. Site24x7’s Docker container logs gave COURE a good understanding of how well its applications were running and greatly helped fix its microservices.
As Umoh put it, COURE has been through generations of changes. With each system change, it has made new asks of Site24x7. Recently, COURE migrated to Kubernetes. It is still early, but Umoh said COURE trusts that Site24x7’s monitoring will be able to meet its expectations, just as Site24x7 did for its monolithic and containerized environments. The way Site24x7 constantly makes improvements is something Umoh wanted to highlight.
One thing I would majorly commend Site24x7 on is constant improvement.
In the past, some of COURE’s clients complained about latency. But with Site24x7’s dual-location availability, COURE receives monitors from different parts of the world. This gives it a better perspective of a client’s actual user experience.
Site24x7 also allows COURE to identify whether an issue is local or transcontinental.
For example, when subsea fiber-optic cables for some of COURE’s major internet providers were broken, its clients in Nigeria were unaffected. But international clients, particularly those in the US, were unable to access its services. Site24x7 detected the issue. COURE has now built redundancy into its system. If one of its major ISPs has a problem, it can switch its servers to route over another one.
What sort of return on investment has COURE seen? Umoh said he could only speak for the technical side, but affirmed that having Site24x7 and knowing he and his colleagues are getting the information they need at their fingertips is well worth the price.
One of the difficulties in meeting SLAs is not having control over your environment. No matter how careful and precise you are, issues can occur, and services will go down at some point. How you get ahead is by being able to detect issues early so you can fix them quickly and increase your uptime.
That is what Site24x7 gives COURE. It also allows the company to compare its performance across different environments, such as Windows and Linux. It gives COURE the ability to make changes based on data Site24x7 collects over time. Umoh said it is no longer a question of the time it takes to detect issues, but simply the time it takes to fix issues.
