How EchoStar Streamlines Hybrid Cloud Management

It takes a complex IT infrastructure of on-premises and multi-cloud environments to support a satellite communications business like EchoStar’s that serves corporate and government clients around the world. For customers, these services are mission-critical so keeping services operational is vital for the service provider.

But EchoStar had a problem. It was trying to manage this complex IT infrastructure with eight different legacy monitoring tools running across 75 different internal servers. Aside from all that management overhead, the company’s IT team was drowning in alerts.

“There were times when we would get 1000 different alerts because a network circuit dropped — and that was just overwhelming,” said Michael Hawn, EchoStar’s director of IT enterprise monitoring and automation.

After extensive market research, Hawn realized that a centralized digital- and AI-enabled operations management solution would give his operations team full visibility and control over alert and notification systems. The company also favored a solution that would integrate with its existing IT systems and tools.

EchoStar chose OpsRamp, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, as it offered secure monitoring of on-premises and cloud resources while also tying into the company’s existing public cloud portfolio — including a handful of systems in Azure, Google Cloud Platform™, and Amazon Web Services. This was not possible with EchoStar’s legacy solution.

“We wanted the scope of a single platform — a single pane of glass — that could look at everything,”

- Michael Hawn

With OpsRamp, EchoStar was able to consolidate monitoring tools from eight to one, while reducing its monitoring servers from 75 to eight. Even more impressive, the company reduced its alert noise by 80%. OpsRamp also helps minimize the time and effort required to detect and troubleshoot issues, producing accelerated response times. Now, Hawn can consult one dashboard and see the status of all of EchoStar’s systems. IT disruptions can be pinpointed as soon as they arise.

“I know where everything is and that’s been a vital change for me,” Hawn says. “When things go bad, I can say, ‘Oh, one system’s down in this remote location or has this error; or here’s a job that’s locked and we’re not passing traffic.’” Now, if 100 emails are backed up in a queue, EchoStar can be proactive in fixing the issue.

In addition, OpsRamp’s solution has significantly enhanced EchoStar’s monitoring through process automation. OpsRamp offers the ability to gather information simultaneously from multiple systems, correlate different actions, and enable a proactive response.

“When something starts to have an error, it’s actually learning and telling us before it happens,” Hawn says.

Michael Hawn at HPE Discover 2024

To learn more about how OpsRamp was able to help EchoStar improve its service reliability and customer satisfaction, read the full case study and watch the customer testimonial video at the links below. And please join us at HPE Discover 2024 in Las Vegas on Wednesday, July 19, at 10 a.m. PDT as Michael Hawn meets with OpsRamp’s Sheen Khoury to discuss how we continue to help advance EchoStar’s hybrid observability strategy. In this session, Michael will share how his team planned and implemented an observability strategy by leveraging the AIOps and hybrid observability capabilities of OpsRamp and the challenges EchoStar overcame to transform their IT operations from reactive to predictive.