LibChalk chalks out digital transformation strategy for libraries with Site24x7

In early 2019, the company was expanding its operations with website hosting and they needed a solution with network operations center (NOC)-level monitoring that can provide better monitoring services to their clients, as smaller web hosting companies usually aren’t in a position to hire someone 24/7 to monitor servers and services, let alone a web hosting service that focuses on affordable web hosting options for libraries.

Previously, LibChalk used tools like Munin to provide a historical overview of server status, but the company determined that they needed something that would alert a small team of technical engineers and server administrators. LibChalk began piloting a variety of paid-for-use software, and most of these cost more than they could bill their library and educational clients that often operated on tight budgets.

The company didn’t want to use a service like Pingdom for just website notifications, but they needed a service like XMatters that can provide real-time alerts and inform team members when something goes bump in the night.

Through a last-ditch effort, the team searched for an affordable version of XMatters, and on a random Reddit thread they found a reference that eventually led to Site24x7. The team felt this was just as exciting as gaining a brand-new full service client for web hosting.

The LibChalk team finally arrived at a tool to provide an automated NOC for 24x7 monitoring, and active alerting that could solve four of their business objectives:

With Site24x7, the team was able to track which services and servers remain up, and for how long throughout the year. Site24x7 StatusIQ, a real-time status and incident communication platform, provided the much-needed updates and alerts automatically when the team put services into maintenance.

When an emergency maintenance is required, instead of sending out an alert, customers are informed to check the dashboard and are given a maintenance reason if a service is impacted.

When something goes down in the middle of the night, the IT team wanted to catch it before it could impact the clients. In an optimal working environment, the IT team's goal is to implement a solution that provides proactive monitoring, and delivers an alert when an issue is about to occur. This might be a certain process that is taking longer than normal to run, for example. LibChalk wanted its IT team to be notified during these situations, but most systems on the market that provide this service were overly expensive

The IT team also utilizes Slack often, and has deployed many Slack integrations, including those for order notifications, support tickets, online chats, tweets, etc

Site24x7 turned out to be helpful for LibChalk's monitoring and alerting needs, and the IT team was able to set up Site24x7 not only to alert team members when there is an outage, but also serve as a backup in an event when key individuals cannot respond to phone calls and Slack notifications.

The IT team needed a tool that could provide a dashboard that displays known problem areas along with potential outages and, at the same time, delivers an easy way to create service tickets and log them with the issue for historical break-fix and tracking of trends.

Site24x7 provides outage tracking and monitoring in an easy-to-read, high-level approach that includes the ability to drill down into more specific details of services, such as logs, processes, etc.

The LibChalk IT team wanted something that is easy to onboard, and does not increase the overall operating costs. The IT team wanted the cost per client to be less than a dollar, without having to compromise on the quality of the service.