Overview
Laboral Kutxa provides investment, banking and insurance services in the Basque region. With now more than four hundred offices, it has now become a major regional bank. To provide a superior, reliable customer experience, they have begun to develop heavily in IT infrastructure.
Challenge
As Laboral Kutxa expanded its online services and data centers, it also created a significant amount of work for its IT team who had to manually monitor for application log errors and VMware configuration issues. Reacting to troubleshooting situations in multiple versions of VMware vSphere and ESXi was time-consuming and meant increased downtime for important services. To solve this problem, the IT team needed a way to automate proactive health checks of all their critical business services. They also needed it to monitor ESXi logs for errors and help the IT team apply VMware best practices and avoid outages.
Solution
Daniel Ugarte from Laboral Kutxa deployed the free trial of Runecast Analyzer as a proof of concept. Deployment itself was very simple and Runecast Analyzer immediately found more than 30 important issues related to their mission-critical services. It also started to parse ESXi logs and sent his team alerts when a problem arose.
Runecast Analyzer is a patented proactive VMware monitoring solution that installs as an OVA format virtual appliance. It combines up-todate VMware Knowledge Base articles and proprietary technology into a powerful tool for analyzing virtual infrastructure health and log content. It exposes potential issues, helps with best practice conformity, and security compliance violations before they can cause major outages.
Results
Runecast Analyzer identified very important latent issues including ones causing purple screen of death, network connectivity issues, ESXi host failures and virtual machine failures. The Runecast Analyzer allowed the IT team to focus more of its resources on company growth requirements, architecture, technology upgrades, and new service deployment. It provided great log analysis automation and exact VMware best practice implementation guidelines, which made Laboral Kutxa’s IT infrastructure more consistent and prolonged its uptime.
"As a bank, it is imperative that our IT operations ensure maximum reliability and security for our clients. Our IT team has too much to work on and simply needs automated proactive monitoring tools. Runecast helps us detect errors in logs and configuration issues before they lead to critical failures. This not only saves dozens of man-hours but also provides a reliable prevention mechanism. Our datacenters uptime is now greater than ever." says Daniel Ugarte.