Sapphire Systems is a provider of cloud-based software and solutions specialising in the financial sector.
It is a global SAP partner of SunSystems, which is financial management software, and it also provides custom-made IT solutions to financial organisations. It started in 1993 with about six staff but now employs more than 200 around the world.
A few years ago, Sapphire realised that its network monitoring tool was not capable of alerting or providing them with any view of the resources that were being used by each client. This made it difficult for the business to ensure that it was charging customers the full amount of the services they were using.
With no functionality to detect or notify about expired SSL certificates administrators had to check and update the certificates on their own, manually searching to find where each one was stored. Performing manual checks and updates was time-consuming, so the business required a tool that provided granular, in-depth analyses of each client with insights into which services those clients were using.
After considering other solutions, Sapphire chose several products from ManageEngine, a provider of IT operations and management software. ManageEngine’s Applications Manager now provides Sapphire Systems with insights into which services are being used by each client. Applications Manager specifically monitors SAP HANA and allows administrators to monitor entire databases, ensuring they have failover measures in place between each data centre.
“ManageEngine gives us a granular, in-depth analysis of what is being used,” says Ken Odibe, senior cloud infrastructure consultant at Sapphire Systems.
“It also tells us when systems are saturated and alerts us before systems go down so that we can act quickly to curb disruption to the service with failover systems in place. ManageEngine has provided us with a level of scalability in terms of what we can provide for our customers that we didn’t have before.”
Sapphire Systems also began using Analytics Plus, which Odibe says, “enables customers to log in without any input from our side and provides them with helpful reports on what they’re using in terms of CPU memory, disk memory, how much uptime or downtime they’ve experienced, and general system availability”.
Odibe says: “ManageEngine’s Key Manager Plus enables us to stay on top of SSL certificates for all of our websites. With Key Manager Plus, we’re able to monitor which certificates are nearing expiration and roll out new certificates in a timely manner.”
He adds: “In terms of customer reporting, we previously had no choice but to manually generate reports to send to our customers.But with Analytics Plus we now have the peace of mind that accurate reports are automatically generated and shared with customers on a regular basis.
“Ultimately the ManageEngine solutions have increased our operational capabilities, thereby bolstering our customer appeal.”
