Scalable and unified monitoring is a top priority for Nijhof-Wassink Groep

Dutch transport and logistics company Nijhof-Wassink Groep has been a mainstay of the bulk transportation industry in Europe since 1967 and is a truly international company with over 1100 employees working at branches in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland and Hungary. 

They have rapidly expanded their facilities internationally during the last year, resulting in greatly increased demands on their IT environment as they strived to ensure the stability and availabilty of their service. This culminated in the introduction of a new data center in Holland as well as the construction of a third center in Poland, currently in progress.

“With the expansion, we’ve had to rethink our environment and the entire purpose of our IT infrastructure,” explains IT Manager Gerrit Otten. “We needed a monitoring solution that is flexible and we wanted to be able to go a step further and verify that the end usage of our service is working. We wanted good alerting and reporting too.” 

When combining two completely separate environments, many challenges arose in the integration process. A consultant from the op5 Professional Services team stepped in with a customized solution and set up an entirely new monitoring system from the bottom up, using op5 Monitor Enterprise+.

As a vital part of their customers’ operations, being able to reliably offer the highest quality service is a top priority for Nijhof-Wassink. They must assure both stability and dependability in the entirety of their business, and when it comes to their data centers and online services, excellent performance and availability are absolute necessities. 

With a bigger environment and quicker growth, it became more and more important to have a monitoring solution that could scale out as much as needed. When the number of reports, analyses and alerts grow exponentially, sysadmins and other IT employees require concise but comprehensive overviews to be able to proactively prevent downtime or other issues. 

op5 Monitor provides an excellent unified view of all monitored objects but also allows the user to drill down as needed. For Nijhof- Wassink, the installation of op5 Monitor Enterprise+ during the process of integrating their two data centers was perfectly timed.

“Our monitoring solution has to be easily automated and integrate well with all the third party tools we use now. Access to good support and consulting is a must, which is one of op5’s biggest strengths,” says Mr. Otten. “We were consistently impressed with our op5 consultant. He was able to provide us exactly what we needed by thinking outside the box and coming up with great solutions. He’s a fantastic resource at op5.”