Markley Group Gains Better Hybrid IT Infrastructure Visibility, Automation with OpsRamp

Markley Group is a Boston-based data center leader that provides co-location and private cloud services through a three-million square foot data center portfolio. The company was founded in 1991, when there was no such thing as the cloud. Today, many of its customers are experimenting in public cloud but often have workload requirements which are better suited or more affordable running on private infrastructure, according to Patrick Houston, Director of Engineering at Markley Group. The company supplements its hosting services with disaster recovery and backup, and direct connections to AWS. “For us, it's all about giving our customers options,” Houston says.

Yet flexibility must be matched with supreme performance and reliability to stay viable in the uber-competitive IT infrastructure services market. Markley Group replaced an older monitoring solution with OpsRamp’s multi-tenant SaaS platform to ensure it could keep delivering high-caliber services to customers regardless of the underlying technology.

Because OpsRamp can monitor any infrastructure, whether on-premises, in a private or in the public cloud, it’s an ideal match for customers that are running hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” Houston says.

Here are the ways OpsRamp is bringing value to Markley Group and its customers:

Service maps and actionable dashboards: With OpsRamp, Markley can now create service maps for individual business services and access the related dashboards to drill down into components. For instance, for the VMware service, the Markley team can view the status of all technologies supporting it, such as storage and web portals, and drill down into subservices to pinpoint the actual issue.
Topology maps for auditors: Markley Group is also finding value in OpsRamp topology maps which show the relationships between application components and infrastructure. During a recent audit for ISO 27001, Markley’s team could show auditors the network topology and server infrastructure which is automatically updated.
Roadmap for automation: Markley is beginning to fast-track toward greater IT automation, beginning with an investment in Ansible. OpsRamp’s integration with Ansible will be instrumental in the journey to make IT processes and workflows more efficient and accurate.
Simplified patching: The company has experienced a 6x reduction in the maintenance windows for patching key operating systems by using OpsRamp as the single system to schedule and execute all patching tasks from one browser window. “This is a real time-savings advantage for us and for our customers, as they have less scheduled downtime during patching,” Houston said.
Business value: As Markley has gained expertise with the OpsRamp platform, the IT organization sees the potential of using it as a single pane of glass and command center to manage all IT operations, according to Houston. “This capability should help us grow our cloud business as well as support another line of revenue by reselling this service to our customers.”