30 January 2014

Cheshire Constabulary has been enforcing the law and protecting the people of Cheshire since 1857. The force is headquartered in Winsford, which is located about halfway between Liverpool and Manchester, and polices nearly one million people. With approximately 4,000 employees and 45 sites to serve, the IT Technical Infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining a high-functioning communication system to keep its law enforcement operations running efficiently.

IT management challenge

The Cheshire Constabulary IT Technical Infrastructure team had previously used HP® Systems Insight Manager to manage their servers and storage as well as Link Analyst® to monitor their networks, but they wanted a new product that could integrate all of that management, monitoring, and alerting into a single, easy-to-read system.

“Prior to having a dedicated monitoring and management system, we found – more often than not – that our customers told us we had IT issues before we knew,” Chris Newton, Network and Storage manager for Cheshire Constabulary, said.

The team sought a product that could provide proactive network alerting for IT problems, was easy to use, and didn’t require particularly intensive technical knowledge to use. They considered multiple products. None offered consistent monitoring, and they were all aimed at a more technical audience.

Solution

Chris came across SolarWinds products when a professional acquaintance showed him Engineer’s Toolset and how it offered simple solutions to his team’s problems. His team was very impressed with an online demonstration of SolarWinds’ Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and they decided to purchase several of their own licences.

“We wanted to have a single product that could monitor all the different aspects of our infrastructure,” he said. “We were able to customise NPM to monitor everything that all the previous products monitored but in one easy-to-use platform.” 

Chris said that while previously the team had used multiple software products to manage their hardware and assets and monitor their network links, the products worked together inconsistently.

“SolarWinds products have given our technical teams the ability to monitor all aspects of our infrastructure that enables proactive fault-finding as well as important diagnostics to help diagnose faults,” Chris Newton said. “This now means that our technical teams are aware of issues before our customers tell us about them.”

Results

The Cheshire Constabulary IT Technical Infrastructure Team found NPM to be a simple solution for several of their problems. It offered centralized network monitoring and alerting and did so in an easy-to-learn, non-technical manner. Particularly in an industry that isn’t especially technology-focused, Chris said he was grateful for the straightforward style of SolarWinds monitoring and alerting features.

“We are now in a position whereby we know we have issues before our customers, but more importantly, we know where our issues are. This provides us with the basis to find the root cause and resolution much faster. We are now more proactive and can address issues before they start to impact our customer base.”

The IT Technical Infrastructure Team at Cheshire Constabulary faced a complex performance issue on their data warehouse but used a combination of SolarWinds’ NPM, Server & Application Monitor (SAM), and Storage Manager to identify bottlenecks and resolve the issue. SolarWinds end-to-end monitoring solution has reduced the number of site visits required to resolve issues, reduced the time needed to fix problems, and allowed the IT team to identify crucial pieces of information.

“If you want a one-stop, integrated solution that is constantly being improved upon, then you will struggle to find a competing product that can assist with monitoring, performance, and fault-finding from applications to storage to networks like SolarWinds does – all at a very affordable price. On the back of our implementation and the benefits we’ve experienced, other police constabularies across the UK have followed suit and implemented SolarWinds solutions.”

Chris Newton, Network & Storage Manager, Cheshire Constabulary, Technical Infrastructure Team.