Custodian DataCentres is a provider of colocation and connectivity services, a key part of our business is the delivery of high-capacity ‘always-on’ networking across all our locations. With a wide selection of hardware platforms and a high overall port count it is essential that we collect high value statistical information in an automated manner. This huge quantity of information must then be ordered, filtered and analysed continuously; bringing only critical events to the attention of the Operations Centre team.

Observium is one of the key systems we use for this purpose, specifically for its ability to discover, collect and graph everything automatically, with almost zero engineer input. Global thresholds and alert templates are then applied to new devices as soon as they are added to our network. Providing an immediate and full view of any new devices, often before the engineers have even finished performing all the of the physical port connections. Recently we have completed a full core network upgrade across a number of our sites, and during this process Observium exceled and really came into its own; way ahead of our other systems. This was largely down to its ability to fully detect, learn and automatically generate all the monitored elements for newly deployed hardware without consuming valuable engineering time. This allows for rapid detection of ports with errors/issues or internal routing adjacencies which are down or encountering issues. Allowing the engineering team to focus on any issues, instead of spending time checking everything manually one item at a time.

Over the many years we have used Observium, it has evolved from a ‘nice little web tool’ to a core and critical element within our NOC. We find the continuous development of the product excellent and we have even added support for a couple of our more obscure devices ourselves. We look forward to continuing to work with Observium and are keen to see what the future for it holds as it and Custodian continue to grow.

Robert Williams, Technical Director, Custodian DataCentres