How Loyola University delivers a first-class learning experience for students worldwide
Loyola University’s objective
- Maintain its reputation as a brilliant university for students at home and overseas.
Offer high-performing digital services for all students
Providing reliable and accessible digital services is essential for universities to uphold their reputation. Over half of students prefer application and acceptance processes to be online and 63% consider hybrid learning to be ideal, highlighting the importance of meeting user demand for digital services throughout the university experience.
The pressure to secure the best and brightest students does not solely rest on faculty; IT departments must provide truly connected campuses and reliable infrastructure, from online learning to interactive classrooms. Education institutions must keep these services performing around-the-clock for students based locally and overseas, plus manage the strain on IT systems when demand for services fluctuates, for instance during key application periods.
Scenario
Loyola University-Chicago is home to 11 colleges and schools, offering more than 80 undergraduate and 140 graduate/professional programs to over 16,000 students from the US to Beijing to Rome. Before using Opsview, the University’s IT team faced several challenges:
- Monitoring and managing complex, hybrid IT with limited budget, time, and manpower.
- Growing demand for services that used strained legacy infrastructure which struggled to scale.
- Pressure from students and faculty to maintain high service levels across geographies.
- Having previously used Nagios, the IT team realized its limitations as a solution. It quickly ran into scalability issues and did not have access to the monitoring capabilities that enabled sustainable growth.
Solution
Loyola needs to maintain critical service levels and manage large IT infrastructures hosted on-prem and in the cloud. The University must also cater for students and faculty based around the world, reinforcing the necessity of accurate, reliable monitoring.
The IT team extensively use Opsview’s infrastructure monitoring dashboards, keywords, and alerting features — all of which are vital to daily operations and aid in increasing uptime for the University.
With keywords fed into alerting, Loyola gains clear and precise insight into IT infrastructure, streamlining issue recognition and resolution across its complex hybrid IT estate. The IT team knows exactly when problems occur, their severity, and the risk of user impact.
As a highly customizable solution, Opsview gives the IT team a tailored and reliable reporting process, adding value to IT’s role within the University’s operations.
What’s more, IT’s purpose extends beyond providing skilled technical expertise and secure resources. To achieve its vision of leading innovation for the university community, the team needed a monitoring solution that affords the time to innovate and, most importantly, could scale as it grows.
Opsview provides Loyola with an easily configurable, scalable, and reliable infrastructure monitoring solution that gives full visibility of everything from syslog servers through to enforcing network security measures. The IT team can efficiently guarantee its hybrid infrastructure provides quality service to users.
Business outcomes and results
- Full visibility of IT issues, their magnitude, and the risk of user impact
- Faster issue recognition and resolution due to improved alerting and reporting processes
- Minimized the resources spent fighting fires, allowing the University to better serve its global communities as they continue to grow
Why ITRS?
After comparing vendors and carefully reassessing Nagios, Loyola University-Chicago found Opsview to be a strong successor. As Opsview is 100% compatible with Nagios, upgrading did not require hours of configuration or loss of existing work. It also means the IT team can access a wide collection of plugins, benefit from an open-source community, and easily create custom checks. This simplified execution, set-up, and implementation, accelerating time to value.
Opsview offers greater security, scalability, and support than Nagios. Loyola University-Chicago benefits from Opsview’s responsive customer service and insightful technical support, which continues to help its IT teams keep up with the growth rate of students and staff.
Deliver high-quality service globally with Opsview’s enterprise-grade IT observability.
