I do not see another monitoring tool that could even come close to the financial benefits you would see from using Site24x7.
All-in-one dashboard
Monitoring and alerting all under one roof
Hybrid monitoring
See exactly what’s going on, no matter your environment
Straightforward setup
Get your monitoring up and running in next to no time
About
tecRacer has been working with Amazon Web Services since 2011 and is recognized as a market leader for its AWS consulting, managed services, and data analytics. In 2021, it was awarded AWS Consulting Partner of the Year for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Location
Hanover, Germany
Industry
AWS services
Overwhelmed. Swamped by irrelevant information. Feeling like the product you’ve invested in is more effort than it’s worth.
That’s not a position you want to find yourself in—no matter your line of business, and no matter the product you’re using.
But that’s precisely where tecRacer—an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and market leader in AWS training, managed services, and data analytics—found itself about five years ago. All because of the monitoring products it was then using.
“The tools we were using were substantially complex and most of the time overwhelming with information not relevant to the issue at hand,” said Sean Kenneth Brown, Cloud computing consultant at tecRacer. “It was proving to be more effort than investment.”
This is the story of how tecRacer went from grappling with unwieldy monitoring products to being able to provide monitoring in a central location for all its customers.
Effortlessly.
No matter the environment.
Not to mention how tecRacer ended 2021 with the award for AWS Consulting Partner of the Year (for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland).
Previous monitoring products
Complexity made results hard to come by
Rewind back to around 2016. Brown and his team were having trouble managing the monitoring products tecRacer was using at the time.
The company was using two products:
- One with broad functionality but which they found to be far too complex
- An alarms product that they found had its limitations
Due to the products’ requirements, Brown and team were finding it increasingly hard to put a monitor in place and get it to monitor what they wanted, let alone produce the results they were looking for.
They needed a change.
In search of simplicity
Wanted: Monitoring and alerting under one roof
What Brown and his colleagues were looking for was a product that would give them the simplicity of monitoring and alerting all under one roof.
When Brown’s boss Sven Ramuschkat, managing director at tecRacer, attended an AWS Summit, he found just the thing.
As Brown recalled, “Sven came back with all this information on Site24x7 and what it can do. He said, ‘Make it so.’ So we did.”
tecRacer has been using Site24x7 since February 2017. What benefits has Brown seen?
Monitoring in a central location
Seeing exactly what’s going on
Site24x7 ensures that tecRacer provides monitoring in a central location for all its customers, no matter what environment they have.
Because while tecRacer specializes in AWS, it has certain customers with hybrid environments: on-premises, AWS, and even Azure.
We can actually see, from the colors down to the individual monitors, exactly what’s going on within our accounts in one central place.
Fulfilling service-level agreements
Giving customers the info they need
tecRacer has a broad spectrum of customers—from banking and insurance companies to pharmaceutical firms and organizations in the steel industry.
Customers not only look to tecRacer for its AWS expertise but also expect reaction and solution times in service-level agreements to be adhered to, if not bettered.
“What we have in our contracts are stipulated SLAs, which we have to adhere to,” explained Brown. And that’s one of the main reasons why tecRacer uses Site24x7.
Because as far as monitoring is concerned, Site24x7 allows tecRacer to achieve its SLAs.
Providing a control mechanism for SLAs
Two decades ago, when tecRacer launched, it mainly dealt with server monitoring—monitoring the server status of CPUs, RAM, and other such things.
Over time, however, Brown and his colleagues started to receive more information from within AWS, using both Amazon CloudWatch and an AWS-native monitoring system.
The team then started to investigate how they could take advantage of the different types of alarm capabilities that were already available in AWS. These needed to fit in with tecRacer’s own SLAs, as stipulated in its customer contracts.
Because, as Brown explained, when CloudWatch starts sending out alarms, it will fire off whatever you want, depending on how many data points have been set to trigger the alert. “But you then need to have a control mechanism to be able to see the alarms coming in and to ensure that it adheres to our SLA functionality for our customers.”
That’s where Site24x7 comes in.
Site24x7’s stability
Improving customer service
Not only does Site24x7 help tecRacer achieve what’s stipulated in its SLAs, but Brown said it’s helped the company provide better customer service.
Over the years, tecRacer has established its own ITO processes, and it now has standard processes for incident management and change management. These are the driving force for tecRacer’s managed service provider customers.
Brown said that having a stable product like Site24x7 means you can provide your customers with stable monitoring and the stability of incident management and change management processes.
Because of the stability from Site24x7 and the flexibility it has provided, we’ve managed to achieve our own ITO processes to provide the customer better service.
Getting new customers set up
A quick and painless onboarding process
Brown said that Site24x7 also helps ensure customers enjoy smooth, fast onboarding.
tecRacer strives to make its onboarding process as quick and as painless as possible. With Site24x7, that can be achieved—again, no matter what environment the customer has.
Brown said Site24x7 takes a minimal amount of effort to get up and running. Setup time is less than half a day.
Of all the monitoring tools that have been tried and tested, Site24x7 is by far the simplest and easiest to set up, configure, and bring online than any to date.
Site24x7’s flexibility
A feature set that keeps getting better
What does Brown like most about Site24x7?
It ties in with what Brown loves about AWS. One of the main reasons he started working with AWS was the flexibility it offers.
He likes the fact that AWS changes so often. Although it can be hard to keep up with, it also caters to the needs of what’s required at that moment in time.
Brown said Site24x7 does the same. “There are so many features within the product itself, and it keeps changing and keeps getting better.”
The feature set within Site24x7: I can’t beat it with any other product.
Brown said that Site24x7 simply fits snugly into each and every AWS and on-premises scenario tecRacer has had over the years.
It continues to receive updates and be enhanced on a monthly basis. Every month, Brown looks forward to seeing what’s coming out, what’s new.
“There are new features and functionalities within the product that are brought out every month. This is what we expect from AWS and is also what we’re seeing in Site24x7.”