Bringing bespoke monitoring to Copenhagen's IT infrastructure

Koncern IT, the IT entity for the City of Copenhagen, supports 45,000 employees and 600,000 citizens on a daily basis. To ensure the highest possible up-time and effective support in the case of an incident in the IT infrastructure, Koncern IT has chosen Proact to monitor its environment outside of business hours. By opting for Proact’s Premium Support+, Koncern IT can have peace of mind that incidents across systems will be discovered immediately, with action being taken to resolve issues.

Defined by strict SLAs, Koncern IT will receive near real time alerts in the event of an incident, so internal IT resource can act promptly to fix the issue. Proact was able to develop this bespoke solution for the City of Copenhagen in alignment with streamlined budget requirements, allowing the organisation to still benefit from faster response to errors and the ability to support 24x7 operations.

“Although Koncern IT had monitoring and support schemes in place, in addition to crisis management plans, reacting quickly to breakdowns during the night could still be improved upon. Proact’s Premium Support+ offers a simple solution to a resource-demanding problem,” said Ole Væhrens, Director of Sales and Professional Services at Proact in Denmark.

“When an alarm is activated at night, Proact now ensures that the IT support person that is on call at Koncern IT is notified,” Væhrens continued. “A new escalation procedure certifies that the alarm is always passed on to a person – it’s not just via SMS or e-mail. This enables Koncern IT to begin resolving the issue straight away – and before thousands of employees arrive in the morning.”

“So far, Proact monitors over 100 critical components in our IT infrastructure outside working hours. Our attention is now called to each critical incident that may create problems and prevent users from being productive for hours,” said Kim Lohse, Head of Core Infrastructure at Koncern IT, City of Copenhagen.

The large scale IT infrastructure at the City of Copenhagen connects 1,700 locations via thousands of WiFi access points, switches, servers, storage systems and backup systems. With such an extensive IT network, there are unavoidably occasional breakdowns and components that need to be replaced or repaired.

“The City of Copenhagen is Denmark's largest workplace, and we support 27,000 IT users daily with everything from tablets to heavy IT development programmes. Proact’s Premium Support+ service not only gives us peace of mind, but is an important strategic step on a long journey to continuously improve and strengthen our IT services,” said Lohse.

“Being part of the Proact Group with specialists across Europe, we have a tested and proven process which is integrated into the Premium Support service, making it easy to on-board customers quickly without compromising quality or security. As a result of this fail-fast approach, together with the customer’s IT team, we were able to implement the solution in just 14 days. Fast implementation and fast feedback from the systems has created some impressive results,” added Væhrens.

“Our main priority is to be one step ahead of the needs of our IT users, both tomorrow and in 12 months’ time. Therefore, we agreed with Proact to try out this agile implementation method. It paid off from day one. The incidents that have occurred at night, during the first month of our collaboration with Proact, have all been solved quickly and efficiently,” said Lohse.