Zebra Technologies makes mobile computers, barcode and RFID devices, printers and communications software for healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, retail and other sectors. Despite or maybe even because of Covid-19, the company has a strong outlook; its stock rose 25% in April and is up 16% over the last 52 weeks, according to The Motley Fool. The analyst noted that Zebra’s business process automation technologies help “grease the wheels” of companies during difficult times. Zebra’s RFID technologies may also come into play for contact tracing of employees, noted Barrons.
Customers rely upon Zebra’s enterprise SaaS solutions to track and manage retail and warehouse assets and inventory, often in real-time. Downtime of those applications is not acceptable, especially in current economic conditions when operational efficiency is critical to business survival. Zebra’s Enterprise Managed Services group is responsible for maintaining service levels and resolving issues for customers.
IT modernization brings alert chaos
But as Zebra’s infrastructure for hosting the SaaS portfolio has evolved – customer applications now run on AWS, Azure and Google—it became harder to track infrastructure health and solve issues quickly for customers. “We were getting bombarded with alerts, every 30 minutes, which were raised by default in our monitoring systems,” says Tommy Eurick, manager of service delivery operations at Zebra.
To meet the needs of Zebra’s multi-cloud, container-based infrastructure, the Managed Services group implemented OpsRamp, replacing a legacy monitoring system. The team uses OpsRamp for server, website and container monitoring along with integrations for Google Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver), Prometheus and other custom-built services to centralize alert data.
Here are the ways OpsRamp is bringing value to Zebra’s Solutions operations:
- Relevant alerts only: OpsRamp’s first response policies enable Zebra Managed Services to reduce time spent analyzing and responding to redundant alerts. The platform’s AIOps capabilities filter and categorize alerts so that only the most relevant events surface, reducing the overload of duplicate, informational or seasonal alerts. “When you have too many alerts, people get into the mindset of ignoring them and then we have issues that turn into problems,” Eurick says.
- Event correlation: Zebra Managed Services is experimenting with OpsRamp’s machine learning (AIOps) capabilities for alert and event correlation to be more proactive with incident prevention, detection and resolution.
- Multi-tenant capabilities: OpsRamp enables tenant-level policy management and role-based access controls to accommodate specific customer requirements. Individual customers can also access their OpsRamp-powered dashboards to view the real-time status of application health and performance.
- Centralized hybrid infrastructure monitoring: OpsRamp’s out-of-the-box and API-level integrations with third-party monitoring tools ensure that Zebra Managed Services can view and analyze data from their three public cloud environments, containers (Kubernetes and Docker), servers, the network and on-prem systems (such as RFID readers on customers networks) in one place.
OpsRamp has been instrumental to our operations as we can now focus squarely on the most important customer-impacting issues and get those alerts to the right person faster, thereby maintaining excellent user experiences across our SaaS portfolio”.
– Tommy Eurick, Manager of Service Delivery Operations at Zebra
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