Upper Swabia Clinic

01. challenges

With the merger of the companies, the managers realized that they also had to implement uniform and comprehensive monitoring of their IT. System and interface monitoring, which was previously carried out manually and therefore only on a random basis, was to be converted into active and constant monitoring. After all, a hospital network needs healthy – i.e. functioning – IT.

The problem was that structures had grown together in the network that had been created independently of each other and comprised a large number of applications and operating systems. The Windows, Linux and NetWare systems as well as various switches had to be integrated into the network monitoring.

The goal of guaranteeing business-critical processes cannot be rated highly enough for a hospital group. And since time is always a precious commodity in hospitals, it was also important to drastically reduce the time and effort previously required.

02. solutions

The new monitoring software needed to be flexible, cost-effective and easy to use. Those responsible also examined various options with regard to the parameters of licensing, platform independence and independence of IT support. With their partner NETWAYS, the IT managers found an open source-based monitoring system that does not incur any licensing costs, is browser-based and easy to customize. But these were not the only decisive factors: “The decision was made in favor of NETWAYS due to both the references and the extensive technical expertise,” said Jörg Napp, project manager and head of the IT department.

The NETWAYS consultants therefore began by setting up a large number of hosts in order to establish a basis for monitoring. As the eGate application had to be integrated, the experts at NETWAYS created a separate plug-in for this purpose. Baselining took place in parallel with the integration of eGate in order to determine the values at which the systems are in a normal state and the values at which an alarm must be triggered. The alerting and user administration has been adapted, as employees without administrator rights should also have access to certain areas.

Together with the experts from NETWAYS, the clinic’s IT staff familiarized themselves with the new conditions.

03. success

Together, they have achieved the goals of integrating a large number of applications and operating systems into a comprehensive and constant monitoring system and reducing the effort involved. The right monitoring system was found and set up: A great relief for the Oberschwabenklink! The monitoring now covers all of the clinic’s systems and ensures seamless, continuous monitoring.

The monitoring software implemented by NETWAYS centrally monitors around 200 hosts with around 500 services – such as the eGate – at six Oberschwaben Klinik locations. “We can see at a glance which systems need our attention,” says IT boss Napp. And so it is possible to intervene and deal with a fault immediately before it becomes a problem. After all, prevention is not only important in medicine.